Object fit question

freetoplay

Hi, I am not sure if this relates more to the technical side or artistic side of things or even both. But I am building out an avatar customization system in 3D. The current issue that I am having is when I swap certain cloths that touches the hair (for example when I swap out a hat for a hood that covers the hair), the hair will tend to poke through. Note that the hair style can change as well. The current workaround is putting an ample amount of space in the back of the hood to prevent hair from sticking out, however this makes the hood kind of look strange.

My question is: is there a way to have any object fit the any hairstyle without creating an ample amount of space for the object?

Eric Chadwick

Yeah you could add bones to the hair, and create poses for each hairdo... No hood, inside a hood, under a knit cap, etc.

Another way could be to use morph targets, that would give you the ultimate amount of control. But that could get expensive since each unique hairstyle would double its vertex count.

throttlekitty

Something I remember from Fallout 3 was that each hairstyle had two meshes; inner and outer. When an actor wasn't wearing headgear, both would show (or maybe just the outer?), and only the inner would be visible while wearing headgear. IIRC it looked pretty nice, most of the inner hairs were basically the same generic style, like short and slicked back or something. Just enough to show that there is hair, but not always a particular style.

Bones is also a good idea, but that can have performance issues too depending on the game and population density.