How To Render Cleaner Hair Animations in Blender
In this blender hair animation tutorial, we will look at how to get decent animations when hair textures give us a lot of noise, artifacts, aliasing, or flickering effects.
Note that aliasing may also be called moire.
The issue can come from many situations, especially when hair is animated in multiple frames.
You may notice that the hair looks okay in a single frame but messy when playing an image sequence. High sample numbers, denoising, and even AI models may not alleviate the issue because we are not dealing purely with noise. We may also be dealing with aliasing, which isn't done in denoising, and not all AI models can deal with it, either.
In this tutorial, we address how to solve rendering problems in Blender 3D, specifically focusing on hair meshes and noise artifacts in animations. Here are the key points to consider for optimizing Blender hair rendering:
Adjust Hair Shader Settings:
Use the Principled Hair BSDF shader instead of complex node setups. This shader offers better control and reduces noise and aliasing.
Adjust the melanin concentration and tint to achieve the desired hair color and appearance.
Render Settings:
Render at a higher resolution, such as 4K, and then downscale to your target resolution (e.g., 1080p). This helps preserve detail and reduce noise.
Use a high noise threshold and high sample rate for better quality renders.
Enable denoising data and use the OptiX denoiser in the compositor.
Compositor Settings:
In the compositor, use the Denoise node to process the denoising data from the render layers.
Ensure the denoiser is set up properly to minimize noise without losing detail.
Lighting and HDRI:
Use an HDRI for lighting to achieve well-lit scenes.
Ensure your character is properly lit to avoid excessive shadows or highlights that can cause noise.
Additional Techniques:
In your video editor, add an adjustment layer with a Gaussian blur to smooth out any remaining noise. This can be particularly useful for darker textures.
Experiment with anti-aliasing settings to further reduce interference and improve hair rendering quality.
By following these steps, you can achieve cleaner, more realistic hair renders in Blender animations. If you have additional tips, feel free to share them in the comments.
Three main techniques work in conjunction to reduce the issue. Note that the aliasing/moire may not be completely eliminated.
1. Replace image textures in hair shader with Principled Hair BSDF
2. Denoising with max Noise Threshold and high Max Samples
3. Render the scene at a resolution higher than your target resolution, then downscale the clip in a video editor
Bonus: Use a bit of Gaussian Blur to soften things up even more.
Check out inspiring solution: • You are using this Render Setting WRO...
00:00 - Intro and Issue
02:32 - Video by @davidkohlmann inspired solution
03:09 - Render and Denoise settings
04:53 - Demonstrating that High denoising and Resolution =/ High render times
05:30 - Additional Render settings
06:13 - Changes to Hair Shader
08:47 - Other great techniques and tools that didn't quite help this time
I will also note that I am dealing with Daz Studio Genesis 8 figures in this video. The hair in these cases are Mesh objects and not a hair particle system.
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