Best Of

Boy, It's been a while. Moved countries. Switched lives. Time to post again. 
I challange you to guess and IP this guy's from.
I figured, one - I now have a favorite one dimensional character. For a hire-modeler, a portfolio should telegraph the right messaging.

Minor update on the fins and shells furballs. It's likely the last one before I wrap up the hair cards system because I'm getting way too sidetracked. They're so fun! I really like the look of the fur, it's so fluffy I want to pet it.

I managed to further improve their look, but they still have the obvious fins and shells frizz from certain angles. Maybe there's a way to blur it with shader magic, I don't know, it's way above my pay grade. What I can do is change spacing and levels amount, which... I actually may be able to without getting stuck with an awfully high poly count because I came up with a very comfortable method to prune fully transparent faces (and also groom shells using hair guides!).

Anyway, here are two furballs using an uneven level distribution. So far testing shows deeper levels don't matter nearly as much as the ones on the surface, they just need to exist, so you can push them up to make the fur look thicker, with a different clumping.

The sheep ball is just using the fur texture height while the punk ball height map is being influenced by a vertex color channel. This can't be easily replaced by textures because each level has an automatic but different vc height map intensity. You'd need to create a new map for each level.



Colors though can be just inherited from a texture set. I'd use a tiled texture for the fur itself and another mapped to the object for colors and stuff.

Tiny update. Still making progress on the cards, but in the meanwhile that fur breakdown thread got me having silly ideas.

Many unknowns, I'll only be sure it works when I get it into an engine, but I'm wondering about what vertex color is normally used for in creatures and clothing, because I got some interesting and easy to create fur effects from it.

Here's a 6 levels shell and fins long fur created from a single 256px x 256px texture set of diffuse, alpha, height, roughness, normal, metallic:



I'm using geometry nodes both to create the shells, drive the alphas and displace vertices to make the fur flow, each using a vertex color channel. I'd probably need another channel to control height properly. For this kind of straighter fur I don't even need extra subdivisions to displace it.

The tips are shitty from glancing angles, but I believe it can be solved with proper math.

Two further tests:



Decreased the distance between shells, slightly increased displacement. The second ball also has a fresnel-driven alpha, err, dampening? The fresnel is adding black to alphas, with higher shells being more influenced by the fresnel, so the fur looks slightly better from glancing angles. Looks cool but increases transparent planes overlap considerably so likely very expensive.

The distance between shells is the main factor in it looking good or not because height maps only go up and the displacement direction here isn't just vertical. I have to look up if Unreal has something like vector displacement and get around learning it (never needed it before) as it probably would help here, reducing the amount of shells needed for longer fur.

I had a sudden thought this weekend and solved three unrelated workflow annoyances. 😄

First one: Sometimes I sink edge loops of clothing to create the appearance of invisible seams.

My usual approach involved manually prepping the mesh in Marvelous Designer with extra edge loops, exporting an unwelded mesh and manually grouping edge loops in Blender to offset them along normals. Do you need to alter some part of the clothing? Shit luck, enjoy redoing all of that.

I got Blender to do all of it by dropping a single geo node on the clothing now; no prior prep in MD or Blender required. It's configurable to accept manual loop additions and removals and works by using boundaries from uv islands, which due to using actual sewing patterns to model clothes tends to make UVs coincide with most invisible seams.





(these clothes are direct exports of early drafts in MD hence the weird topology)

It was a pain to get the loop cut and slide to work correctly and without destroying UVs, geonodes still don't have anything for either op.

The same boundary edge loops selection logic led to the solution of another issue: Sometimes I want to just smooth surfaces without subdividing them; or subsurf them without changing the shape of their boundary loops at all.

Now I can.

Custom smoothing node with pinned boundaries ◼ x standard subdivision surface ◼



No edges grouping or manual creasing required, although you can manually include boundaries by marking the area if you wish. This node can also restore some of the volume lost to the smoothing process.

When I went down this rabbit hole it wasn't with the intention of solving my crumpled hair cards issue, but the solution is somewhere in there. The custom surface smoothing works wonders for small deformations of the cards:



And I got something more or less working for the edges. I'm not happy with it because they lose too much volume (the trick I'm using for surfaces doesn't work in this situation), and I'll probably have to pull data from each boundary loop individually because being lazy and using values from the control curve to restore volume didn't fly. It's either too little or too much:

iam717 said:

congrats on getting this far.

Nothing really to say but i had to figure out the 1st post above at this part:

" but in these awful this seems a slightly more secure" awful - times, was missing.

Nothing major just stood out to me, neat thread, i am decidedly on an off with blender so one day this might come in handy.

Thank you, good catch! I used to be more attentive when reviewing messages. 😆

------
Tiny update just to say there's one!

I scratched a hair alpha directly in Blender with a mouse and no stabilizer to better understand the type, scale and amount of variants I need for each type of hair layer. Looks better than I expected, hahah, I'm shocked the baby hair isn't a full disaster, and it's not as see through as I expected given the low amount of base layers.



For context, these are going to be my first proper realtime hairs. I've done one or two solid mesh bun styles for game jams before, and I'm used to grooms or hair for sculptures like in that first bust, but realtime? That's new.

Speaking of sculptures, I'm doing my best to not get sidetracked testing the system to create hair for them. 😂

This one was my first Blender bust and you can see that with the min twist annoyances and everything at the time I just gave up on the back. I feel using these nodes would go so smoother, I'd have room to experiment with placement and giving the hair a nice flow instead of spending 90% of the time pushing control points around. Refrain from doing thin loose strands, throw a remesher over it to join them into a mass and I might even have a way to do some very fine-looking hair for printing.

Edited to add today's QOL node: Hair clamping for baking.


Long overdue since I baked those hair locks weeks ago and got a bit of clipping at edges. Runaway strands are clamped and flagged so I get to decide how smooth them. Now I can pack as many card variants as possible without anything getting visibly clipped or accidentally invading their neighbours' real state.