So way back in 2014, I wrote about the research I was doing on the Current State of Rendering Hair my goal at the time was to see if I could apply the concepts of that research (which was designed for fiber based hairs) to the more common transparency mapped hairs of the hobbiest market. I was targeting the 3Delight rendering engine in DAZ Studio.
Fast forward through a number of life changes in 4 years and I’m starting to look at this again. However in that time the rendering engine of choice for DAZ Studio has changed from the Renderman compliant 3Delight to the physically based rendering Iray engine from Nvidia.
This has some advantages for me since the core of the Material Definition Language (MDL) already has a lot of the concepts of 3D surfaces built into it, I mostly need to write some custom code for the scattering and transmission components. I also still have to work out how to make the rendering engine think a piece of geometry which resembles a long flat ribbon is actually a collection of hair strands, but I have some ideas on that one. Will provide some updates once I get somewhere with this.
Karl's Journey 