Bake XGen Fur into Normal Map?

atxr

Hello there

I'm trying to make a horse model for game engine use, and I really want there to be a texture of the body fur. Given how short and sleek horse coats are, my lecturer suggested using Xgen to create fur and bake it into a normal or displacement map.

I don't have much experience with xgen, so I've hit a block now that I've groomed and masked the hair to my desired style. What would be my next steps in order to bake the hairs into a normal map? I already have a normal baked from my high poly, so ideally I'd like it to bake into that. I tried to convert the primitives into polygons, but I guess the count must have been too much since Maya crashed during the process.

  

  

Eric Chadwick

What you need for the horse hair is an anisotropy map, which isn't easy to bake (but there might be a way with Xgen?).

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorials/comb-map.html

poopipe

You can bake normals etc. directly from the xgen hair using Arnold  RTT with one of the utility nodes (I forget the name but it's the one that can bake uvspace and world space normals etc.) 

You can also bake a direction map that can be used to feed an anisotropic material in the same way (there are a couple of options in the utility node that will work depending on the target shader)

As Eric says, anisotropy is the correct way to deal with this, baking the hair into a normal map just looks crap.
I've tried most  options for this fairly recently cos I had to come up with a fur authoring and rendering pipeline for a game full of furry things. 

gnoop

poopipe

Does it require  a shell hovering over the fir  or it bakes it directly to the surface  it grown from?

atxr

@Eric Chadwick

Ah, I've already created a map like that when I attempted to use a fur generator in Substance painter, do you reckon this would be suitable, or should I follow the method of using Paintshop Pro?

poopipe

gnoop said:

poopipe

Does it require  a shell hovering over the fir  or it bakes it directly to the surface  it grown from?

Arnold's RTT works like any other Baker, you just need to provide it with a target mesh 


As long as the map defines a direction vector you'll be able to use it for anisotropic highlights in some way.  The nature of the map will be determined by the shader you're using.