Fibermesh to Game Hair

Phoenix995

Hello fellow Polycounters

Currently i'm trying to find a intuitive and Artist friendly way of creating Game Hair.

What came to mind was Fibermesh, because its really straight forward and Artist friendly. 

Has anyone of you guys experience turning Fibermesh into Game Hair?

Thank you in advance

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Phoenix995

thank you very much for the link.
the thing whith doing it by hand is, that it takes for ever and as the hair get denser with every game it is going to take longer and longer. so i found this breakdown on zbrush central and i thought it very intuative and quick way to get good looking results: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?204993-NPC-Smith&p=1199360&viewfull=1#post1199360

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MrHobo

I use fibermesh to bake alphas and thats normally it. However I do get my base cards out of zbrush by doing the following, depending on time and complexity I will combine this with a hair card brush in zbrush also:
1. Sculpt a medium res proxy of the hair mass, the main focus is form and flow.
2. Mask and create poly groups based on that form and flow of the proxy
3. Use zremesher with a high target poly count setting and the "keep groups" button turned on.
4. Repeat step 3 slowly lowering the polycount settings each time until a nice balance of polycount and flow is reached, example start with like 8k, then to 6, 4, etc. Go to low and zremesher will shit the bed.
I usually start with whats on the left (sometimes more of less detailed) and end of with whats on the right.

5. Export an OBJ with groups turned on into maya, and clean up and weirdness/adjust where cards end/cleanup, etc.
6. Unitize UV's on the cards. Grab all the outter edges, move and sew, and bam straight clean UV shells for easy mapping.
7. You can then go back to step 2 and create an alternate set of polygroup that are positioned slighty different to generate some more cards in different positions for layering. 
This wont get you "finished" cards but it gets rid of a lot of the headache stuff I think and if youre pressed for time can make life a bit easier.

thomasp

notice how the actual hair on the character's head from that breakdown was done with planes constrained to splines in max the manual way? it's only the beard that is converted from fibermesh. would be far too messy a result for longer, layered hair. been there, done that.

Phoenix995

thomasp said:

notice how the actual hair on the character's head from that breakdown was done with planes constrained to splines in max the manual way? it's only the beard that is converted from fibermesh. would be far too messy a result for longer, layered hair. been there, done that.

you are right
your models look awesome by the way. whats your workflow for creating hair? would be awesome if you could share some pro tips

thomasp

@Phoenix995
thanks well i'd say use fibermesh with settings similar to those from the breakdown image (wide strips with a texture assigned so it generates UVs) to create a mockup of the hairstyle so you know what kind of length, density, overall silhouette and comb direction you need to go for.

if you need a bit of chaos like that beard or some short stubble, you can always export bits of your original fibermesh as geometry and it'll have UVs right away which is handy.
but for the main elements export a percentage of fibermesh as curves into your 3d package, clean them up as needed and use as guides to align handmade cards to or convert them into geometry/tubes with UVs (max and blender can do this at least).

i do my textures like this now: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2515743/#Comment_2515743

Phoenix995

Thank you for the answer
Sounds like a good way to do hair