I agree with dustinbrown, I'd love to see this integrated into a game engine or model viewer. Being able to use something like this via a plug-in with Unreal Engine or something would definitely be nice for non-production (or small team) uses.
they mention at the end of the slides a free version with a free maya plugin..so it looks like they're thinking about getting it into the art community's hands...
"Alright mr Jensen Ive gone and given you a sweet fohawk with bleached tips"
"I never asked for this"
I was at that talk and it went right over my head, though loved the results. I think its worth our time as artists to be getting better at using film esque tools for hair modeling. be it Fibremesh/Hair and Fur/Ornatrix.
were getting closer to this kind of thing being a reality in games.
That looks awesome, but it doesn't seem like something that would be available to artists doing personal work at home because of how much tech support it looks like it requires. I only mention it because I imagine a lot of people's first response is going to be "Great! How can I do this with my own art? I'm sick of hair cards!"
The Hair DCC tools alone are often prohibitively expensive for individuals. You would really need to be working at a studio where someone high up the food chain really wanted the best hair possible in the game. The rest of us are still stuck with hair cards. If I'm wrong, I want to know because, as cool as it is, it's difficult to get truly excited about something if it's so esoteric that it might as well be an in-house tool the rest of us will never get to use.
Isn't this tech in addition to hair cards? I thought this was a gap filler between hair cards and full blown simulation. Basicly allowing hair simulation magic on top?
The Hair DCC tools alone are often prohibitively expensive for individuals. You would really need to be working at a studio where someone high up the food chain really wanted the best hair possible in the game. The rest of us are still stuck with hair cards.
When will the 'free' maya plugin be available I cant find info about it
Since one slide says "coming soon" I guess it will out by April. Can't wait for it too, I hope we see a UE4 integration soon after the initial release! I mean with the source fully available it should just be a matter of time. Great move from AMD to make it all freely available!
I saw some people also working for a plugin support of Tress FX in UE4, so hopefully it will be possible to author via Maya and then directly bring the data to UE4 without any convertion. Like Apex.
I have no idea what I'm legally allowed to say or not about almost any of this, but I think I can answer a few things:
There's a few things that might be a bit confusing that I can clear up:
Authoring Tools:
You basically need anything that can make hair splines.
We authored our hair using HairFarm, but Fibermesh, Hair&Fur, or anything else would work just as well.
Basically you need cool looking spline hair.
So the PDF in layman's terms (for artists):
The additional Max/Maya proprietary tools we developed were simply to:
- Break each 'clump' of hair into their own individual chunk (defined as a 'wisp').
- We then Automatically create a chain of bones for each chunk (We call this the Master, and the individual splines of hair become defined as 'slaves')
Then we export this mofo into our engine.
Then the other half of the Tools are:
Shader + Physics
The shaders are sets of hardcoded values, which we can use to determine colour/variance, spec, strand width, etc...
Blond: It "can" be used for grass, but keep in mind this is primarily developed a 'skinned object' with bones n such. This tends to dramatically increases performance costs.
I also believe with the current setup we're using, some of the largest costs are due to shaders+screenspace, so it comes at a pretty considerable cost on a couple of characters.
I'd imagine a field of grass that took up the entire screen would turn everything into a slide show.
Jean-Pascal Thanks man!
TressFX is actually an AMD thing. Eidos built their own proprietary tools for the integration of this, but I don't see any reason as to why this wouldn't make its way onto Unity UE4, or Marmoset in the near future.
Plastix = Actually Pubic hair is quite easy to do in hairfarm. The general cost is the number of vertices in the splines, but yeah, we could make pubes pretty easily if the AD wanted that.
^_^
teaandcigarettes/Bek I have no idea what you're talking about.
;D
Dustin/Zac I honestly it can be integrated into Unity and UE4. I don't see it as being much different than tessellation.
Heck, it wouldnt surprise me if someone just puts something into their respective marketplaces for $$$$$. The issue is still creating the proper authoring tools, which I also think could be done by scripters (most of it seems to be based around 'defining' existing content).
PhattyEwok
TressFX is quite costly, so we found in some cases, hair cards are a nice hybrid solution.
Replies
Think the same tech could be one day used for grass clumps?
Also, do you know if tressfx tools will be avalaible to everyone?
Lets wait for the next itteration: TressFX 3.5 PubicHair
Next Jensen, clone of adam.
"I never asked for this"
I was at that talk and it went right over my head, though loved the results. I think its worth our time as artists to be getting better at using film esque tools for hair modeling. be it Fibremesh/Hair and Fur/Ornatrix.
were getting closer to this kind of thing being a reality in games.
Isn't this tech in addition to hair cards? I thought this was a gap filler between hair cards and full blown simulation. Basicly allowing hair simulation magic on top?
but NVIDIA providing NVidia hairworks for Unreal 4 , coming soon
https://developer.nvidia.com/content/nvidia-gameworks-increases-pace-innovation-unreal-engine-4-games
Since one slide says "coming soon" I guess it will out by April. Can't wait for it too, I hope we see a UE4 integration soon after the initial release! I mean with the source fully available it should just be a matter of time. Great move from AMD to make it all freely available!
I have no idea what I'm legally allowed to say or not about almost any of this, but I think I can answer a few things:
There's a few things that might be a bit confusing that I can clear up:
Authoring Tools:
You basically need anything that can make hair splines.
We authored our hair using HairFarm, but Fibermesh, Hair&Fur, or anything else would work just as well.
Basically you need cool looking spline hair.
So the PDF in layman's terms (for artists):
The additional Max/Maya proprietary tools we developed were simply to:
- Break each 'clump' of hair into their own individual chunk (defined as a 'wisp').
- We then Automatically create a chain of bones for each chunk (We call this the Master, and the individual splines of hair become defined as 'slaves')
Then we export this mofo into our engine.
Then the other half of the Tools are:
Shader + Physics
The shaders are sets of hardcoded values, which we can use to determine colour/variance, spec, strand width, etc...
Blond: It "can" be used for grass, but keep in mind this is primarily developed a 'skinned object' with bones n such. This tends to dramatically increases performance costs.
I also believe with the current setup we're using, some of the largest costs are due to shaders+screenspace, so it comes at a pretty considerable cost on a couple of characters.
I'd imagine a field of grass that took up the entire screen would turn everything into a slide show.
Jean-Pascal Thanks man!
TressFX is actually an AMD thing. Eidos built their own proprietary tools for the integration of this, but I don't see any reason as to why this wouldn't make its way onto Unity UE4, or Marmoset in the near future.
Plastix = Actually Pubic hair is quite easy to do in hairfarm. The general cost is the number of vertices in the splines, but yeah, we could make pubes pretty easily if the AD wanted that.
^_^
teaandcigarettes/Bek I have no idea what you're talking about.
;D
Dustin/Zac I honestly it can be integrated into Unity and UE4. I don't see it as being much different than tessellation.
Heck, it wouldnt surprise me if someone just puts something into their respective marketplaces for $$$$$. The issue is still creating the proper authoring tools, which I also think could be done by scripters (most of it seems to be based around 'defining' existing content).
PhattyEwok
TressFX is quite costly, so we found in some cases, hair cards are a nice hybrid solution.
Jackablade Ha!
It would have to be pretty fabulous.