Hair cards UV question

swarmedia83

 Creating hair with this technique has been a thorn on my side for months. I just cannot for the life of me find substantial and thorough information out there. So i'm trying to tackle it one problem at a time. 

 So one issue that's been plaguing me is setting up the UVs for the hair cards. Depending on the type of hair and how much detail one would want to put into said hair you can have like 3 different hair card quadrants or as littler as 3 islands in one quadrant. 

 Anyways my issue is how do i control the sizes of the cards once UVd? I do the cards using IMM in zbrush, and UV it in Maya and they tend to come out small and in a crap ton of islands that just leads to more work. Lets say i have like 30 hair cards, but want just 4 different hair textures how would i size the UVs so theyre overlapping properly?

joaobaltieri

There's a nice tutorial in the following link, were you can find some answers.. https://www.3dartistonline.com/news/2015/04/how-do-i-create-real-time-hair-for-games/  I'm trough this, and i'm unwrapping the cards in maya... i go to the following order, first, in the Uv Editor do Polygons>Unitize to make all the cards fill de uv 0-1 space, then go to Mesh Display>Conform, after this you can do Polygons>Move and Sew Uv Edges and rotate the uv shells in the desired direction. After this you can spread out the uv shells by doing Polygons>Layout.. You also have to do Polygons>Unfold to minimize the uv's stretching.. You can also select the shells one by one and do Polygons>Normalize to overlap them exactly.. after you can rescale and reposition as you want. Hope it helpes somehow.

Justo

joaobaltieri is on the mark with the tut he's sharing. The polycount wiki has a lot of useful info too on hair. In the end, many artists agree that no automated programs will place hair cards for you, and that's work the artist has to make, much like a hair stylist has to groom hair with their own hands. Thomas's thread is chuck full of great hair and useful tips too

kanga

That is one useful tute!
Here is a goody :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BtNQ3c2fo4