Hair Limitations
Where there is light, there is also shadow. Hair has the following limitations regarding the standard/physical renderer (for Redshift limitations, see here):
- The Hair object cannot be assigned to a Subdivision Surface object, but only to the Cage object below it (however, the hair still grows on the SDS surface).
- Hair is a volumetric effect when the Standard Renderer is used, which means it offers flawed results when combined with other volumetric effects such as PyroCluster, volumetric Clouds in Advanced Render (Physical Sky), etc.
- When used in conjunction with the Physical Renderer, you will not be able to take full advantage of the complete spectrum of Hair parameters (see Hair and the Physical Renderer).
- Photon Caustics does not work with Hair.
- Infinite light sources will be treated as point lights when casting shadows.
- The Cinema 4D Display tag's visibility does not work in conjunction with HAIR.
- Hair can on occasion be rendered with the Render-Manager (in this case, render in the Picture Viewer).
All of these limitations do not apply if you render the hair as polygons (render time and memory requirements will rise sharply). So, how is this done? Simply select a Hair type from the Type menu in the Hair object's Generate tab. Before you do so, don't forget to reduce the number of actual hairs.