Michael Rew posts some nice tutorials dealing with Zbrush, Maya, and processes with different render engines such as RenderMan and Redshift. His latest, a look at creating hair and fur effects uses Maya’s Xgen and Redshift’s rsHair shader.
Maya’s Xgen offers a method for instancing pretty much anything. That makes it great for a lot of things, including hair and fur. Redshift does a great job rendering hair through its hair shader. It can simulate the complex and anisotropic reflections that are typically found in real hair and fur. The shader takes its inspiration from “An Artist Friendly Hair Shading System”, a white paper from Sadeghi et al.
Rew walks through creating and applying hair descriptions though Xgen, converting those to a mesh, and then rendering with Redshift. Also covered are the hair shader attributes.
