Fur shading

No shadows or shading

Without fur shadows or shading the fur will look less realistic. The rendering time is the same for simple shading, but shorter than with fur shadows. If you do not want fur shadows or shading in your scene, do one of the following:

• Do not add fur light attributes to the lights in your scene.
• If you have already added fur light attributes to a light, remove them, or set the Fur Shading Type to No Shading. For details, see Remove fur shadowing attributes from a light.
  Note

  Not all of the lights in your scene need to have fur shadows or shading. You can have some lights in your scene that add no fur shadows or shading and some lights that do.

Simple fur shading

To shade fur that is relatively realistic and takes no longer to render than no shading, set Auto-Shading as the Fur Shading Type in the Fur Shading/Shadowing section of the light’s Attribute Editor. There are two aspects to Auto-Shading lights:

• Self-shading
• Back shadows

Fur depth map shadows

To generate realistic shadows onto fur and geometry, you create fur shadow maps. A fur shadow map represents depth information generated from the position and orientation of a shadow map light. Maya uses this depth information when rendering fur to create two types of shadowing: fur shadowing (fur casts shadows on itself) and geometry shadowing (fur casts shadows on geometry). Only a spot light can be used for shadow maps with the Maya Software renderer.

When you render fur, Maya creates a shadow map for each shadow map light. Be aware that although generating several fur shadow maps may produce more realistic results, it takes time and slows rendering. In general, one shadow map takes twice as long to render as no shadow maps and two shadow maps take three times as long to render.

The following example shows fur rendered without fur shadow map lights (and no Fur Shading), and fur rendered with one fur shadow light.

Raytraced and depth map shadows (for use with the mental ray for Maya renderer)

If you’re using the mental ray for Maya renderer, you can set up fur self-shading and shadowing using either Depth Map Shadows or Raytraced Shadows. Depth map or raytraced shadows are created based on calculations by the rendering engine and is the preferred workflow over the use of fur light attributes.

• Create fur shading and shadows
• Create fur shading and shadows using the mental ray for Maya renderer (Method 2)