Best method for realistic looking hair on mobile?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey all,
I gotta come up with a realistic character for a mobile (tablet) game, running on unity.
So I was like oh, that's gonna be fun, and then I got to the hair. Well it's not.
I gotta get this hair done realistically, better if it has some sort of movement too.
I considered all the options... going with planes of hair, in the style of The Last of Us. That one looks promising, but I'll have to get it done with very few planes since this is a mobile thingie, not a PS3. So I'm hesitant to start this long process.
I considered sculpting it all the way, but that would be a brick of hair, which might end up looking nice but I'm not so sure it'll be convincing enough.
And of course, I was wondering about unity's hair solutions, maybe it supports TressFX somehow and there's some way to get it working on mobile... unlikely, but worth a shot...
Anyway, if you had to make a realistic female bust with long hair to be presented on a tablet using unity, what method would you use for hair?
I gotta come up with a realistic character for a mobile (tablet) game, running on unity.
So I was like oh, that's gonna be fun, and then I got to the hair. Well it's not.
I gotta get this hair done realistically, better if it has some sort of movement too.
I considered all the options... going with planes of hair, in the style of The Last of Us. That one looks promising, but I'll have to get it done with very few planes since this is a mobile thingie, not a PS3. So I'm hesitant to start this long process.
I considered sculpting it all the way, but that would be a brick of hair, which might end up looking nice but I'm not so sure it'll be convincing enough.
And of course, I was wondering about unity's hair solutions, maybe it supports TressFX somehow and there's some way to get it working on mobile... unlikely, but worth a shot...
Anyway, if you had to make a realistic female bust with long hair to be presented on a tablet using unity, what method would you use for hair?
Replies
As for what you can do, it's highly dependent on the type of hairdo you're giving her. If it's a ponytail, you could have several cylindrical shapes over eachother with alpha mapping to give volume while looking nice and volumetric but still keeping the cost down. But for loose hair this obviously doesn't work.
If you've got a specific style, perhaps some concept art drawings or photos, then we'll be able to help you much better.
It's all about finding a design that works well with what is available, traditionally long hair is really hard to pull off and requires a lot of work and eats up quite a bit of the tech budget that could be better spent on other things.
Do you have a specific hair style in mind?
Anyway, thanks
Initially I wanted to go for a curly fluffy hair, but that was back when I really didn't think of the complicated methods I'd have to practice to get it done. It was just an idea which quickly proved to be impossible in the time frame I have.
So right now, a pony tail with some loose strands will be nice. I might manage to grind some extra time for it if I try, but I have 2 problems - one is I've never done planes of hair before, I only did sculpted hair, so it might take longer than it should. The other one is that I'm not sure if doing planes of hair on such a low poly model is a good idea.
It's going to be an application running mainly this character (and some props which will be texture heavy, not polygon heavy), it should work smoothly on an iPad 3 and it's being developed on Unity, which probably means it won't be overly effective with the processing power.
I did a quick mockup just to have something on her head, I'll post a picture of it later on and will be happy to hear some advice on how to do her hair with planes. The Last of Us is the kind of look I'm hoping for, obviously lower poly and not necessarily as clean and polished (due to lack of time and this being a first time at this type of hair and all), but that's what I think will give the correct result for what we need, so I gotta find a way.
My main problem is making the hair look "full" while using few cards, and how to treat the hairline. The balance between the paint on her scalp and the hair coming out of it is very tricky to pull off, especially without the proper time. Time. Goddamn the time.
I make games in unity and Im often surprised how many polys the ipads can throw around!
I'm caught up with some consecutive projects that have extremely tight schedules, I have no time to study or experiment and I have to crunch out some pretty high quality stuff in a very short time. Any material for me to learn from will be much appreciated
I tried searching for past hair threads but I saw many of them die out without comments. The thing that helps most is actually people's comments, and not the "teacher posts", because that way I know what to expect and mostly the answers to those questions are there already.