How do i create fur or hair on a game ready asset?

illbleed

I'd like to create fur or hair on a character. I seen a great tutorial using alpha maps, which is awesome and all, but gives the least realistic results.
Doing some youtube searches i see xGen, hHair, fur, and TressFX? Not really sure which would be the way to create for a video game. TressFX seems amazing, but i don't know what exactly that is. I know tomb raider uses it.

TressFX
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRJZ1z3Fsg[/ame]

Using Fur
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH157bZTyC0[/ame]


The only way i know how to so far
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wi4-fdeYyM[/ame]


for the last video, i have issues in unreal engine 4 loading both sides of the alpha map. So when i look at my models from behind the alpha map its invicible. Not sure what that could be an issue with. I'll have to post screenshots of my model tomorrow. Maybe someone could assist me with that.

Eric Chadwick

Hair creation methods.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/HairTechnique

Why the problem occurs and how to fix it.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Transparency_map#Sorting_Problems

illbleed

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

Hair creation methods.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/HairTechnique

Why the problem occurs and how to fix it.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Transparency_map#Sorting_Problems

Ah thank you, i didn't see that on the wiki.
What do you think about the latest GMH release? Does it use the same techniques? it looks about so. Except easier.

http://www.polycount.com/2015/05/13/gmh-2-6/#more-16502

Eric Chadwick

It looks promising! I've not used it, I don't create characters often enough. $49 is very affordable though. Support the author!

Brian "Panda" Choi

As someone who just got used to GMH, I THINK it works well. Just getting used to its hijinks.

The ability to not paint, but have sliders to affect hair broadly with noise, curls, different kinds of curls, when curls start. It feels good, minus the workflow hill I'm trying to get over myself.

illbleed

Brian Panda Choi wrote: »

As someone who just got used to GMH, I THINK it works well. Just getting used to its hijinks.

The ability to not paint, but have sliders to affect hair broadly with noise, curls, different kinds of curls, when curls start. It feels good, minus the workflow hill I'm trying to get over myself.

Ah so would you recommend it? it looks great, and i'd much rather use this over having to manually place alphas for hair. I have bad luck with alphas, still trying to figure them out. I guess something called Z-buffer will help. I took a little break from learning because i was getting overwhelmed with more questions than answers lol.

jamieniman

For anyone using Unity3D I would definitely recommend the tool Fur Factory. You can quickly create fur and then cut, comb and style it!
Check out more at www.furfactory3d.com

DanaosC

Depending on the fur, I've found Rodrigo's technique working exceptionally well!

throttlekitty

Is there a new trick to combining meshes for proper sorting? There's no way I'd want to do that by hand.

thomasp

you don't have to sort anything. it's not transparency but rather like 1-bit alpha (cutout) with dithering so you just feed it a greyscale mask. alpha-to-coverage was the term we used for this like 8 years ago on PS3/X360. still the same i think, toolbag just happens to use a high quality version of it.

throttlekitty

Thanks. Maybe it's just the scaled down image so I can't see the dithering, it looks like blending from here.

kolayamit

DanaosC said:

Depending on the fur, I've found Rodrigo's technique working exceptionally well!

This process looks great, have to try this. Thank you!!