Hair and Fur is broken why?

[iOSYS]

Perhaps someone can help me with this strange error I'm getting. I'm using the hair and fur mod to do some... hair and fur. I tweaked the settings to how I want them, style it, etc. When I render it without lights, fine, with 1 or 2 lights, fine. If I add more however, any kind of Gi, or anything like that, it simply does not render. It calculates hair shadows and things, but nothing shows up in the render.

I tried just deleting the one I had applied and applying a new default one, but it does the same thing. It doesn't matter if its on shadow map, area, or raytracing, it just fails like that.

Since it still did not work with a fresh modifier applied, I think it may be the object itself? or am I missing the check box marked "make fur work now"? Max 9 by the way.

Thanks.

[Ndege]

Hmm, that's a weird one. I have had rigs with 8 or 9 lights on hair with no problem. I usually just have two lights specifically set up for hair that exclude everything else in the scene, because I have found it's easier to control the look. Never had any problems with GI issues either, but I don't use GI that much with characters with hair.

Make sure the composite method is not set to "off". You would get just what you describe at this setting; shadows, but no hair. This setting is for if you want to composite your hair in a different layer. See below for a typical reason why you would do this.

If effects are not turned on in the render tab, you will naturally not get any hair effects, but then again, you wouldn't get shadows appearing, so that's probably not it.

The most common cause I've had with hair not appearing giving the result you have describe (other than me messing up the settings in the render effects, which I manage to do with startling regularity) involve geometry between the camera and hairy object. In the default "normal" hair compositing method hair is rendered based on z-depth occlusion. If there's any geometry in the way, including objects with transparent materials or normals facing away from the camera, the shadows will render in the initial render pass the hair will not appear after the hair pass.

The fix is to clear the camera path of all objects. If you must have transparent objects between the camera and hairy object (windows, eyeglasses, transmapped eyelashes) render in passes and composite the scene together. If you can't or don't have time to do that use Mental Ray and MR Prim hair or take your chances with setting hair type to geometry, or seeing what setting compositing to "G-buffer" gives you. The last two can be gambles as to what you end up with.

Other than that I would start the troubleshooting by merging the object into a new clean scene or trying to render the scene on other machines and see what happens.

[iOSYS]

Yeah, I tried merging and there are no occluding objects or anything. It works well enough in this instance to set it to geometry, I just hope this isn't a recurring problem. Thanks.