FUR! This stuff is a huge pain. It made up the majority of my problems with the Beach scene. But, I learned (and relearned) so much! Getting the colors just right was an exercise in frustration and actually one of the last things I got to look right.

Upper Left: One of the earlier successful furs, it was just too difficult to notice from a distance. However, it was the first successful integration of Global Illumination and Caustics into the scene. I've done all these before, even with fur, but somehow I always forget some part of the complicated setup and have to debug it and pour over the old works to figure out what I forgot.

Upper Right, Lower Left: Like here! These were unsuccessful GI and caustic renders. Also, They were poorly lit by regular lights and I hadn't made custom adjustments to the AO shaders on the model yet, so he was very shadowy. Custom AO adjustments are necessary because any scene geometry (including invisible, non-rendered ones) can cause shadows and the AO rays or whatever they are, are global If you put him in a sphere, no matter how big and no matter how many lights you put inside it, the dark AO "shadow" will be used. I understand and expect that, but it can be a pain some times. It's one of the reasons I considered the AO shaders temp. They don't do so well with interiors. I don't exactly use them as a shadowing device, though. I tend to use them more as a mechanism for painting in color dynamically, usually with blatant disregard for realistic physics. Oh how I long for more control over how the algorithm operates, but I am a long way away from being able to (competently) write my own shaders. I also suck at manually doing what it does by actually painting textures. I have half-a-dozen ideas for things to try to get around, abuse, strip out and repurpose, or otherwise manipulate these things, but I only have so much time to experiment.

Lower Right: This is a rare one! This is one of the 9 frames that rendered for 10 hours and retaught me that fur wrecks the anti-aliasing adaptive sampler. So smooth, so clean... Ugh. I really wish I could have figured a way to make it work with AA. I got a few other ideas bubbling, but there's little I can do about them for now. They require either very complicated (for me at least) compositing schemes or diving back into the convoluted legacy AA, which is really finicky and generally a lot slower (except, now, for fur because fur can have overrides set for it.)