Kajiya-Kay... OK?

[robcat2075]

The MuhHair and Kajiya-Kay plugin shaders work to make Particle Hair look better by re-shaping the Diffuse and Specular response of their surfaces.

Kajiya-Kay is the easier one since it has no parameters of its own, it's just ON or not. However, unlike MuhHair, that lets you fine-tune the placement of highlights on the hair, Kajiya-Kay requires you to carefully place your specular light source... as you would in real life lighting.

Here is hair with no extra shader and Specular Intensity 0 in the surface properties.

 

Same hair, but with Specular Intensity greater than 0. The renderer seems to regard the hair as one simple mass and paints the specular highlight on top of that.

 

Same hair but with Kajiya-Kay. A more individual-strand appearance to the specular highlights.

 

Note that for ANY material using a plugin shader, you must Set Plugin Shaders ON in your Render Options.

 

And for this particular PRJ you must set Options>Rendering>Use Settings from> The Camera.

KajiyaKayTest007.prj

[robcat2075]

Update: Occasionally, the None-None version above will render like this, which is a pretty good look. But it doesn't always do that... i'm not sure why.

[Wildsided]

Cheers Robert, I'll check that out for my next hair experiments.