What it does: Absorbs and reflects light - but specifically for hair.

Use it for: Hair and fur.

This interesting shader is like a mix of the diffuse, translucent and anisotropic shader.

Generally hair is a headache in CG. Not only is it hard to create and groom in an attractive way, but it's extremely taxing on rendering, both in simulation and rendering. That's because hair is basically an enormous amount of tiny geometry which has to look right as a whole.

So this shader takes advantage of the fact that we don't care what each strand looks like, we only want our awesome fluffy character to look good. Yes, you could create a pretty good material for hair using diffuse, glossy and translucency or SSS, but that would take a really long time to render. So instead, this shader takes a shortcut and does some very clever approximations of what each strand looks like from afar. The strands are pretty terrible if you look at them up-close, and don't even think about using it on normal geometry (ok, do, it's pretty cool), but when used on actual hair, it works really well.

Properties