White Rabbit

this guy is my first attempt at rendering hair in production.
Rendering hair in XSI4 (2004) wasn’t exactly a walk in the parc.
A lot of tools had to be developed inhouse especially in the shading department.

the following is a shading/passes breakdown I did in 2004 for RenderNode, a now defunct online cg magazine.

constant pass : flat colormap transfered to hair from the skin

occlusion : rendermapped skin occlusion transfered to hairs

ambiant : ambient environment lookup (using the hair normal) of a set probe.
the shader uses spherical harmonics

lambert : wrap lambert using precomputed deep shadow maps

skin : the shader uses the chanlum technique to compute illumination .
I used this pass to enhance the “white fur” effect.
It also creates a translucence effect in the ears.