09/07/2026
Hair R&D p.1 💇🏼♀️
A personal exploration of hair, serum and suspended particles.
I decided to use Octane instead of Redshift, although at first I wasn’t even sure Octane could render hair in a physically accurate way. In the end, I was really happy with the results.
The first and most important thing is lighting. My setup consisted of a Stripe Light (using a line texture into the Distribution) positioned directly above the hair, a Key Light (rectangular area light) placed to the side of strands, and a warm HDRI to gently bright the darkest areas.
The second is hair thickness and strand count. It’s worth experimenting here - start with the default thickness and then try increasing or decreasing it. Thinner strands are noticeably harder for Octane to render efficiently, while thicker strands render much faster.
The third tip is less obvious. Octane doesn’t seem to care much about the density of the hair topology, but adding a Resample node at the end with Subdivide Curves significantly speeds up rendering, even though the strand ends up with more points.
To my surprise, the final render took only around 4 minutes per frame at 2K resolution on my RTX 4070 Ti (and 2 min on second shot).
Huge thanks to for their breakdown videos, they helped me understand several hair animation techniques.
Sound Design — .mp3
