Separate texture sheet for anisotropic hair?

Kenolisauce

I’m in the process of breaking my character up into designated texture sheets and I’m wondering whether I need to have the hair on it’s own separate sheet. I know I’ll need to paint a flow map to get the anisotropic shader to work but is there a way to make the flow map/anisotropic effect only apply to the hair and not other items on the same texture sheet?

Mightily appreciate any help!

EarthQuake

If you want to put the hair on the same sheet apply a unique material to it in your 3D app. This will give you unique material in Toolbag.

Generally though for games, you would use a separate map/material anyway. For hair you want alpha, maybe an aniso direction map, so it's better for memory use and fill rate to have this as a separate texture. For instance, if you add alpha to your base texture you increase compressed memory usage by 2x. If you only need alpha for a small portion of the texture, this is typically inefficient.

Additionally, if you lay your hair uvs out in the same direction, you can usually get by without needing to paint an anisotropic direction map. The shader has a direction setting, so long as the hair runs in the same direction you can just use that slider. Of course, if you want micro level variation to the aniso direction, an ansio map is a good idea.

Kenolisauce

Thanks for the response EarthQuake. I’ve considered all the points you mentioned and I’ll go ahead and keep the hair combined with the rest of the body. It’s stylized and doesn’t use an alpha channel so I won’t be unnecessarily doubling file sizes. 

I messed around with keeping the hair laid out all in the same direction and got some pretty good results without a flow map so I think I’m good to go here!