Today after the horrors of the day before, I went to try again to cache the hair. Mat and I took a look at it, tried to cache it a few different ways. These caches failed since the hair doesn't move around the way it should. Caching the hairsystem (like it should) was again a huge probem and maya stopped responding. I'm still not sure if it's my file that doesn't like the cache folder, or if the computers aren't powerful enough (which would be weird considering the 20 gig memory and the dual quad-core intel, but hey, who am I to judge its capabilities?)
Trying to look for it himself, Mat asked a copy of the file to find out if it will work on his own computer, so for the time being, I'm rendering the girl bald, since that's possible now because of the assigned render layers. There's a layer with all the geometry that isn't influenced by caches, and another layer for only the hair. After rendering they can be composited together in After Effects. To make sure you don't render the hair that should be invisible, you have to have the geometry that covers or is covered by the hair in the same layer, but assign a new material that will have the "black hole" as its properties. The black hole will make the geometry "invisible" in the render, but it's technically there, creating an alpha channel so the hair can be layered on top of the other layer when compositing.
By the time I'm posting this, the first 450 frames will hopefully be rendered, and I hope I can get the rendering finished tomorrow so I can put the files in after effects and do some minor sound design.
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