Best Of

This is a really good looking fur! I was already familiar with the shell technique, but yours looks particularly good due the care in adjusting each shell maps and the height map usage.

I gotta say I'm itching to recreate a few steps in your breakdown using Blender geonodes to automate them. 😂

Edit: I gave the node setup a go and had a thought while putting it together. It's possibly a very stupid thought, and I hope it's okay to post it here, but since AAA clothing tends to have a decent polygon count nowadays I wondered: What about channel packing extra displacement variation into the vertex colors? Hell, what about using a regular single UV quadrant and adjusting the alphas directly in shader with a vertex color controlled blending mode? The diffuse color variation per shell has negligible impact in my tests, the only map truly needing variants is the alpha. And the diffuse variant could be derivated from the same alpha VC anyway. It feels wasteful to dedicate texture space for something that only sees a minor fairly constant variation.

An earlier test with just displacement and vertex color variations:



I don't know the cost of using an overlay or linear light blend in Unreal, if it's more expensive than using dedicated textures for each shell, nor if VC tends to be used for something else in clothing, but if at least one channel could be spared for the alpha it'd make creating shells so easy. You can have any odd number of shells you wish without having to subdivide and create extra maps. Proof of concept in Blender:



A sharper fur in the VC overlay method can be achieved by remapping the vc to something like 0.2-0.8 instead of 0-1, discarding values that are too close to 0 or 1 alpha.

Using something like a nodes setup you just input the number of shells, distance and other settings and it'll generate them for you while simultaneously calculating the alpha value and storing it in the vertex color of each shell.

And a bonus: Base + single shell using overlay mode, displacement derived from VC alpha, discarding values under 0.2. You add shells for longer fur.

miguelnarayan said:

This week, I'm showing concept artists how to deliver game assets 300% faster using 3D. (no,you don't have to use AI; there isn't a need) while also raising the bar for creativity.

-

Find it here: https://www.menogcreative.com/design-blog/3d-concept-art-materials-style-guide

Thanks for the support to the community