Hair Shadows Maps

RonnelP777

Hi Everyone, I was watching Naughty Dog's presentation in Zbrush Summit 2016. I saw them bake shadow maps for the hair. Now I was wondering what type of light was used in this scene. Could it be point light, I can't tell. 
Does anyone have an idea?

ZacD

Looks like they used a geosphere and put a point light at every vertex.

RonnelP777

Do I necessarily need do something to link and attach the lights to the vertices, or do you think  the sphere only serves as rig for the point light to bounce so I just have to snap the lights to the verts and no light linking involve?

Eric Chadwick

No linking needed. There are scripts for making all the lights quickly, look for "dome light" on Scriptspot.com

RonnelP777

I see that those scripts are for 3dsMax, are there any scripts there for maya? Or even equivalent?

Mark Dygert

It's a very common technique. There are a bunch of dome light scripts for maya on creativecrash which is like scriptspot but for Maya.

You can also search for "sky dome" "light dome" "QuickGI" "FakeGI". I wouldn't be surprised if Naughty Dog quickly cooked up their own dome light script, it wouldn't be too hard to write and their tech artists are balls to the wall crazy talented.

You could also just make one by hand, instancing the lights, snapping them to verticies and referencing it into your scene whenever you need it.

RonnelP777

I think I'm just gonna do it by hand right now, but how do I instance light? Light doesn't seem to instance in the duplicate special tab?

JacqueChoi

Max's skylight does it.
It also respects the alpha which is super nice.

RonnelP777

Thank you guys for your answers. I'm gonna post my work here once it's finish. Thank you again guys.

thomasp

so are you working with a custom technology that reads these shadowmaps and modifies the hair object shadow casting like i remember the ND one was said to do? i'm not aware that this stuff is exactly standard and easily doable with the popular engines (out of the box) but would love to be corrected.