Hair & Transparency Issues

Jarjarniks

Hey guys, nooby game art student back here with a new problem.

This is my first time trying to make hair for games, so its no wonder that I am running into issues. I have no particular talent for painting, so its all very basic looking.

I feel like I have a basic understanding of the technique, painting the hair, adding an alpha and pasting white for the hair bits and have everything else be black.

Now here is the result I get:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=20200&stc=1&d=1413028987

Here you can see the albedo map:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=20199&stc=1&d=1413028987

and the alpha:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=20201&stc=1&d=1413028987

So, how can I get a better result? What changes should I try to implement?

almighty_gir

the first thing i can think, is that you need the hair colour to continue in the albedo map even after the alpha ends... essentially what's happening is that the alpha is softening and toolbag is rendering the black pixels in the albedo.

Jarjarniks

Ahhhh, interesting theory, I'll try that out, that might be it! Thank you

Biomag

Always paint beyond the mask - prevents issues with mipmaping or anything else that reduces your texture size and might leave you with artifacts at the edges.

If you are using Photoshop with .png and don't know how to work around the not properly accessible Alpha channel -> make one completely colored layer for your texture and then simply add a mask to this one layer. Contrary to regular transparency when saving a .png with Photoshop it will handle the mask as proper Alpha channel and therefore also have the colorinformation beneath the mask stored and not just transperent pixel.

EarthQuake

almighty_gir wrote: »

the first thing i can think, is that you need the hair colour to continue in the albedo map even after the alpha ends... essentially what's happening is that the alpha is softening and toolbag is rendering the black pixels in the albedo.

Yeah this is almost certainly the issue, make sure the background layer is the same color as the hair, not black, and this should go away.

Also, be sure to use the dithered mode, not cutout. Dithered will look a bit noisey in the viewport but will render out smooth. More here:

http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/character-setup

Jarjarniks

Thank you very much for the feedback guys, I'll take a look at it!

Jarjarniks

Hmm, it seems like I dont quite understand how marmoset works, I thought as soon as you loaded in a mesh and its textures that it was rendering realtime and all you had to do was hit f11 to grab your pictures, is this not the case?

EarthQuake

When you export an image it gets super-sampled which improves the quality of various elements including providing anti-aliasing, improving the quality of local reflections, and dithered alpha materials. The super-sample settings are in the capture settings (ctrl+p).

You can improve the look with dithered materials even more by rendering extra large (like 3840x2160 instead of 1920x1080) and sizing down in photoshop.

More about sampling and dithered materials here: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/glass