Although rendering hair is similar to rendering anything else in Softimage, here are a few topics that you should know about.
You can have motion blur on hair whether or not it has dynamics applied to it; however, without dynamics (live mode), the results can be less predictable. With dynamics on hair, make sure to select either Read & Write or Read only as the Cache Mode in the Dynamics Operator property editor (see Making Hair Move with Dynamics).
For more information on motion blur, see Motion Blur [Cameras and Motion Blur].
You can use field rendering with hair as you would any other object in Softimage.
If you have dynamics applied to hair, make sure to select either Read & Write or Read only as the Cache Mode in the Dynamics Operator property editor (see Making Hair Move with Dynamics).
For more information on field rendering, see Field Rendering [Rendering].
Segmented and Distributed Rendering
If you want to render hair over a number of machines, it's faster to use segmented rendering (rendering a scene as a separate, non-overlapping sequence of frames on each render machine) instead of distributed rendering. This is because the amount of data generated for the hair rendering exceeds what's stored in the scene.
For example, if you were using segmented rendering, you could load a 500K scene that has a character with 50,000 hairs on it. If you use distributed rendering with 10 render slaves, you would need to spread about 160 Mb of data (50,000 x 10 x 32) around your network. The time to copy that amount of data over the network usually exceeds the time needed to render it.
For more information, see Batch Rendering and Distributed Rendering [Rendering].
To use segmented rendering for hair
Set the hair to Read only as the Cache Mode (see Making Hair Move with Dynamics).
Split the sequence into n equal length segments, where n is number of machines on which you want to render.
