Finished -- Attempt to get Cougar fur similar to theHunter-Call of the Wild fur

Alex_J

I've got my game model of a cougar ready and am now going to begin some experimentation to try and get fur rendered in UE4 that will look something similar to the animal fur in theHunter : Call of the Wild (in game shots below).

I really have no idea how they accomplished it, but it looks awesome. My guess is some kind of special hair cards that are vertex painted, or pick up the color from the underlying texture somehow? Displacement? (edit : avalanche studio's character artist artstation mentions a custom fur shader) I really can only guess. I actually found the artist who made them on artstation and wrote to him about it, but no reply. Perhaps it's a proprietary technique. If anybody has an idea about it, I'd love to know! Everything I've found about animal fur so far is basically the same techniques as your use for character hair.

My first step will be just to texture this model as is. Then from there, I think I may begin by trying something along the lines of the Ryse Moss Tutorial, and I'll also see about making some hair cards similar to what you see in the screenshots below and playing around with that.


Screenshots from theHunter : Call of the Wild

WadeWT

I can't say for certain how that game did it, but judging from the screenshots it looks like it's a multi pass shader.  The concept is identical to that moss tutorial, except the vertices of the model are just offset for each pass of the shader rather than creating x number of copies of your model.  I use Unity mostly so I can't help with UE4, but I did a quick google and found some fur shaders on the marketplace.  Just be wary, though, because quite often they might lack important features for more realistic fur, like being able to control the direction and length using textures of vertex colours. I'm not certain if UE4's material editor supports multi pass shaders either, so editing someone elses might not be an option unless you're familiar with HLSL.

Good luck with this, hopefully you find something that works.

Alex_J

Thanks @WadeWT , that gives me a lot to go off of. I don't know nothing about writing shaders beyond basic work with the UE4 material node editing (which I guess is just visual shader scripting), but maybe with a few weeks of research and experimentation I can come up with something decent. Maybe that is totally unrealistic though, considering I have no experience in the subject.

Worst case scenario, I just do hair cards along with the "moss" technique in certain areas in order to get this finished in a decent time frame, and continue to poke at learning how to create a multi-pass shader in my spare time.

edit -- I've found a fur shader on the UE marketplace that looks like it will cover most of what I need. I'm going to start with this. Ideally I just need to make a few special maps, and not have to write any code.

Alex_J

Ok, thanks again to @WadeWT for pointing me in the right direction. 

I've purchased Advanced Fur Shader from the UE4 marketplace and its just about perfect. Here is a test material applied to my model. 

Just a matter of making some color maps, and then going to need a few iterations to get a "growth" map which appears to be a grayscale map that will tell the shader how long to make the fibers. I need this especially around the face. 

Some spots will still have to get hair cards, like some long chunks that hang from the belly and inside the ears. One concern i have is that the subtle muscle detail in the shoulders is completely lost in the fur. I'll have to see how I can get my normal playing along in here as well. 

Well, it's all planned out pretty well now. Should have results in a few days.

Alex_J

After much experimentation, I've got a decent workflow down to generate color maps quickly. It's fast and fun, so I will make a couple variations with different patterns and tint. This is shaping up to be probably my favorite model so far.

Alex_J

Getting there. A few finishing touches to do : add whiskers and make some exciting poses, then this will be wrapped up for now. I want to make several different fur pattern variations. 

Overall super happy with this awesome creature. It's been a ton of back and forth look dev I guess is the term, but I've really enjoyed making this more than any thing I've done before. Can't wait to do more awesome critters like this. 

The Advanced Fur Shader is an awesome asset that has really taken this model to the next level. It's on the Unreal Asset Store for about $40. It lacked a few key features I wanted, but the developer responded to my request and delivered exactly what I asked for in a day. There is still a bug with the fur length vertex brush I haven't worked out, but I think the cougar is still looking nice even if the fur length is uniform.

Alex_J

Finished, with an alternate model. This model has exceeded my original expectations. Largely due to the excellent shader. 

I look forward to going further with this shader on future models. Custom displacement maps, material blending, a few things like this to give me a bit more control may go a long ways.

Also, next time I should separate the toes on the paws, so that an animator could splay them out. Other than that, I think the base model is pretty solid and should serve well to build some tigers, lynxes, jaguars, etc from.

Good Cougar

Bad cougar

Cougar buddies