It's happened to each of us. You get the perfect scene set up, ready to render with the Iray renderer. You have your characters in place, their clothing is awesome, the poses are dynamic and exciting. You spend time meticulously setting up your lighting. Then you load in your favorite hairstyle only to see that it does not render as perfectly as it did in those other render engines.

Iray handles materials differently than other render engines, and auto converting them to the Iray Uber Base rarely makes a perfect translation from older material shaders. There are hundreds and hundreds of wonderfully made, carefully setup hairstyles by some of the most talented content creators the 3D world has to offer. However, Iray wasn't available for DAZ Studio when those hairstyle were created. It's not the fault of the artist, or the user who has trouble modifying materials to get the best look.

Along comes UHT Hair Shaders for Iray. What is UHT? UHT stands for "Universal Hair Texture" and is a very easy-to-use solution for setting up great looking hair in DAZ Studio for the Iray render engine.

UHT is a set of 24 hand painted highly detailed textures and bump maps that replace the textures, bump, and displacement maps of nearly any hairstyle available on the market. UHT replaces the textures, but keeps the original transparency maps that were tailor made for the particular style, so no need to worry about square cut transparencies. All of the fine strands and nuances of the original are kept intact. And UHT's 24 colors come in two version: Wider Streaks and Thinner Streaks. The thinner streaks give a sleek look for smooth hairstyles, while the wider streaks give a nice chunky look with plenty of highlights and low lights.

And UHT is easy to use. Simply apply a preset color from the original product that most closely matches the color you will use from UHT. This loads the transparency maps and establishes a base on the skullcap. Then, select the hair material zones in the Surface Tab that you want to convert to UHT and double click a color preset. It's that easy! You can apply different color presets to different sections of hair for a unique mix. If your scene lighting is very bright, you can use a preset to adjust the shine. Thinner, wispier hair can be made a bit thicker with the translucency presets. Presets to add or remove displacement add just a touch of thickness to hairs that might look a bit flat, catching even more highlights and giving shape to the edges of the hair panels. Many options are available to give you a great hairstyle in Iray every time.