Baking particle hair/fibermesh to alpha planes

womball

Is there way of translating particle hair or fibermesh (zbrush) hair unto a poly strips with baked alpha maps? I find it difficult to make the randomness that happens at the ends of hairs manually in photoshop.

cryrid

Render the fibermesh with BPR, and you'll be given a few different passes including one that can be used for masking.

Alternatively, you can use a black document background with a white flatcolor material, and export that.

womball

Would it be wiser to just render out several strands of hair on flat surfaces, and take the bpr renders to make the alphas?

Also have you used metamesh to make the hairs? The low poly hair strips it can generate look like it could be used for hair creation, but I haven't seen any body use it yet.

Mask_Salesman

Hey long time no see womball, You can convert fibermesh to an exportable mesh then just bake that straight out, in xnormal you can set the background non baked area to be a different colour which is effectively a mask depending on how far you set the rays to go. Altho I imagine there's a more accurate way. I think you can actually create masks with baking in max.

I remember someone on ZBC actually made a thread about using fibermesh solely for alphaplane baking.
I don't have a link tho soz ;

There's a bunch of hair related threads there so might take some sifting to find.

womball

Hey Mask, how have you been?
what type of map is the bake in xnormal?