Art Test - Hair Cards and the Scalp - Am I Crazy?

Salki

Hey Polycounter's, I usually sit back and am pretty hesitant about posting here - the talent is out of this world. That said, I've got a question for you all, I seek your wisdom.

I've recently been working on an art test and am at the final stages of it - the hair. From my experiments the below method works (although I don't have any renders of the hair on there yet), but am I crazy to do this or is this not a common practice? My reasoning behind this is I saved so much texture space and can just throw the hair planes on an alpha sheet - I just have to ensure there aren't any gaps in the hair.

Your input / feedback would be super helpful as I hope to have this finished by the weekend.

Thanks!

Snader

I would always try to have a closed and textured mesh. You never know what might happen, maybe they'll write him to lose his hair in a burning building. Or how about LOD issues?

Besides, if you keep it a bit simple, you should be able to get away with about as much texture space as his belt pouch - certainly not a whole lot of pixels. Plus you'll never be able to completely get rid of every single gap in the head without spending a lot of extra triangles; triangles that could ALSO have been spent on the scalp.

It's not crazy, but it's definitely un-ordinary, and quite risky.

Salki

Thanks for the reply Snader. I do have the scalp I removed just 'extracted' as a separate piece in my scene file. So I could just throw that UV'd over some skin as a safeguard. Another reason for removing it was saving poly's but I will have to just find ways to optimize the rest of the scene.

Stromberg90

Well the amount of polies you saved by removing it, will easily get added when trying to cover up the hole with alpha planes.

Also think this belongs in tech talk

Ravanna

reign in some of those belt pouch clip polys!