A question about creating hair for games

taurobinsonfarrar93

So I want to use unreal engine to render my student film, but I just found out that I have to create the hair differently than I usually do. Apparently, I have to create hair planes and then apply a transparent texture to all of them. So my question is would I create hair planes for the eyebrows or just paint them in substance painter? 

Also, do I wrap deform the hair planes to the character's head or parent all of them to one of the joints? 

Alex_J

Eyebrows is your call. Probably depends on how close the camera would be and what level of realism you need. 

Hair cards could probably start by belonging to the head joint. I don't know what the pro's do to simulate hair physics -- probably some combination of novel physics solutions and animation. I suspect that sort of thing may beyond the scope of a student project, but hopefully somebody more in-the-know can help you there.

thomasp

depending on just how realtime optimized or not your scene needs to be it may be feasible to create hair with the standard toolsets for this.

one of epic's unreal engine demo characters - appears to be covered mostly in geometry, including the peach-fuzz:

from: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Resources/Showcases/DigitalHumans


modern videogame assets will use far less complex hair geometry than this and require a lot of manual work to create anything resembling hair. it will take real practice to get anywhere doing that.

RN

Eyebrows can definitely be done with hair cards, there's some beautiful live examples from NikZava284 at Sketchfab:
https://sketchfab.com/niki284/models

You can click pieces of geometry to look at their material, zoom in, open the Model Inspector to use the wireframe mode and tick "3D+2D" to see the textures as well (for hair you want to select the Opacity channel of course).

But about technique, there's this paid tutorial by Georgian Avalsicutei. It's got nice screens but I have no idea what it's like, maybe someone else has tried it:

https://gumroad.com/l/yXlMP

Alex_J

That's a good tutorial. It might go fast for an absolute beginner though.