djx blog

A few months back I wrote about using puppet's p_shader_replacer to override maya's fur shading with the p_HairTK shader. I discovered a strange anomaly that I thought would be worth a mention. But for the rest of this post to make sense you need to know how the p_shader_replacer works. If you don't, have a look here.

So here's the thing: The name of the object that holds the geometry shader and the name of the furFeedback node actually matter. Specifically, the name of the object that holds the geometry shader needs to come before the name of the furFeedback node from an alphabetical ordering point of view. And in this case capital letters come before lowercase.

So this works: pCube1 , polySurface1_FurFeedback - because "pC" comes before "po"

but this does not: pCube1 , PolySurface1_FurFeedback - because "pC" comes after "Po"

and this works: ApCube1 , PolySurface1_FurFeedback - since "A" comes before "P"

Easy once you know, but if you don't then depending on your naming some of your fur will just ignore the p_HairTK.

I'm currently using shaders_p v.3.3 beta 11 for Maya 2010 (win64) and find that p_HairTK is very stable, often quicker to render than maya fur and has better shading attributes. An especially interesting, and welcome benefit is that it fixes the NaN (black pixels) problem that seems to haunt maya fur.