3D Realtime Hair
polycounter lvl 5
Hello everybody! I've been working with hair for a few months now, figuring out what works best and what doesnt, here is the latest asset I made in my free time that I can show, there's still some figuring out to be done when it comes to the shapes, but I'm happy with how this turned out. I will be making breakdowns of the pipeline and include some advanced tips and tricks.
Game ready tri count at 8k tris, here's a beauty render in Toolbag, using a shader I wrote that works similar to the hair shader of Unreal Engine, fading out the edges with the AO map, giving it a softer look. C&C is much appreciated
I'll be posting more images and the breakdown of the pipeline, here and on the Artstation post Cheers!
Game ready tri count at 8k tris, here's a beauty render in Toolbag, using a shader I wrote that works similar to the hair shader of Unreal Engine, fading out the edges with the AO map, giving it a softer look. C&C is much appreciated
I'll be posting more images and the breakdown of the pipeline, here and on the Artstation post
Cheers!
Replies
Great work anyway, hope this helps.
I used anatomy in the sense of where the natural hairline is, why the flow work the way it does etc, but mostly based on reference.
You mentioned you wrote that shader, are there any more details you could share about it?
So yeah, it's not something super fancy,it works the same way as the UE hair shaders works in case you're familiar. Uses the dot product of the camera direction and card's normals to mask out the edges of the silhouette with the AO map, so it looks like dense cards have flyways, essentially giving it a softer look.
Unfortunately I'm not very familiar with the UE shaders, I always mean to take a character to UE but end up choosing Marmoset for the familiarity. The shader sounds good though (and can see already that it works well)
Cheers mate!
I tried finding that UE hair shader that you mentioned, the one that fades the sheets based on V-dot-N, I think there's something in here.
Quoted from their photorealistic character article:
Edge Masking
Though not specifically part of the shader itself, it is worth noting that the Material used on the example character's hair - as well as the other characters of Epic's game Paragon - uses what is called an "Edge Mask" to fade the hair away as it becomes edge-on to the camera. Since hair is rendered as a series of planes - see Hair and Geometry below - it is likely that from certain camera angles, one would see the edge of each sheet, breaking the hair effect.
To help alleviate this problem, the Material calculates the camera's vector against the vertex normal such that as the surface turns perpendicularly away from the camera, it will also fade away to complete transparency. The other side of this approach, however, is that in doing so it is possible that the hair shader may show more of the scalp. This is also why many characters with thick heads of hair will often have a hair texture painted on the scalp, as seen in the image below.
Cheers mate, truth is I wasn't sure about the depth, maybe it needs a bit more shadowing, or no rim light, but Im glad you think so! Not burnt out yet! Plenty of energy and the breakdown will come
Thanks dude Im glad you like it! So yeah its that but also I baked AO to the vertex color which I think works great for that extra realistic darker depth.
About the shader, yes actually this is the part I rewrote in Marmoset Toolbag!
@AFsoft Cheers! ^^
Really appreciate it mate! Yeah word, Hair creation is so tricky and I still have a long way to go, so I'll be glad to share with you guys the files and the techniques.
Can't wait to see your breakdown