[michaelplogue]

Well, it would appear that the problem is with 3dsMax being unable to send the job to Maxwell. I was able to generate approximately 45,000 hairs, with 20 nodes each by creating them in batches. However, when Max starts rendering, it crashes. This bunch of hair had 7.5 million faces. Even reducing it to 15,000 hairs @ 20 nodes (2.5 million faces), Max crashes.

Now, I'm not sure if it's necessarily a Max problem. I know that windows XP Pro can only address up to 2 GB of RAM. Once I get WinXP64 up an running, we'll see if there's any difference.

[Aldaryn]

"Splittig hairs"

Could this be a limitation of the maxll plug? Once I've rendered a car containing over 4 million polygons with MW, and the render started successfully. Can you export the geometry into 3ds? Maybe you could combine all of the geometry in Matador. I would love to see another cool Maxwell hair render!

[michaelplogue]

Well, it appears to be a problem with third-party renderers. I get the same crash with mental ray. However, when I tried it with the standard scan-line render, it had absolutely no problems rendering it.

My test was a simple sphere with 50,000 hairs, each with 8 nodes.

Of course, this would be a moot issue if Maxwell eventually supports atmospheric effects. (hint hint, NL Team!!!)

[Mihai]

Michael, try exporting first the resulting meshes (as fbx for example), then import them again into a fresh scene and try to render. This worked for me on one ocassion I was testing.

[michaelplogue]

Michael, try exporting first the resulting meshes (as fbx for example), then import them again into a fresh scene and try to render. This worked for me on one ocassion I was testing.

Hey! That did the trick Mihai! I had tried exporting to OBJ, but that crashed on me as well. I tried the FBX and it's working like a charm. I'm now rendering 50,000 hairs @ five nodes each.

Now all Ive got to do is learn how to style hair!

I never know how much I'd have to learn playing with 3D. First I had to figure out how to design clothes so I can use the ClothFX plugin. Now I have to learn how to style hair... What in the world have I gotten myeslf into...