Modo 601 Hair Test

ARTISTIC THOUGHTS
Very unsatisfied with my picture

40K Hits!

I did a test render sequence for the hair. The following is »just« techno bable.


TECHNICAL
I am using more and more »modo 601« for my renders and try to completely drop »Carrara« in the future. The last render I did had some serious problems with her hair. You can see her hair is very thin and her scalp is looking through the strains. Very unsatisfying. I wasn't able to find the reason yesterday.

So today I did a quick test render trying to find the problem. The reason was simple: I forgot to invert the mask in modo. Poser and Carrara uses transparency masks where black is transparent and white is opaque. modo does it the other way around. So in my picture you see the parts which should be transparent as opaque and vice versa. Glad I found the solution to the problem.

Her is run through of my test-renders:

(1) hair model without any texturing
(2) hair model with false transparency map (not inverted)
(3) hair model with correct transparency map (inverted)
(4) like (3) with a reflection layer

Picture (4) only differs slightly to (3) but there is a very subtle shimmer in her hair. It's not very visible in still pictures. But in animations it will react to the surrounding light making it more lifelike. I am using this material model in the future.


TOOLS USED
Poser 9, modo 601, InkScape 0.48