Baked Facial Hair

DustyShinigami

Hi

I'm a little unsure and confused as to how to approach baking facial hair similar to Arthur Morgan's in Red Dead Redemption 2.

For something like the head, I know that a hair cap can be used and the hair can be baked straight to that. However, for fine stubble like above, I don't believe any additional/duplicated geometry was used...? This face texture found online looks to be a part of the overall texture...

Or was something like this perhaps projected on via paint like with ZBrush's Spotlight...?

Thanks

Alex_J

Probably they just projected an image or maybe even handpainted. 

If you tried to bake geometry hair it's likely that you get some projection issues. I'd expect anyway. It's a possibility, but probably more work/less flexibility than just old fashioned texturing techniques. 

thomasp

Baking on a groom works fine but it has the same issue you get with painted or projected elements - it's very dependant on head texture resolution and uv layout - normally not high resolution enough to display fine facial hair and perhaps a bit distorted in places. You also don't get hair shading for your beard, it's all lumped in with the skin. Fine for lower fidelity of course - RDR2 is after all a PS4 game from a few years ago.

If you are working on this kind of thing in 2021 you might as well use a 'beardcap' and support it with hair cards for longer strands. All that can be sourced from a groom rather quickly. If it can be made to look as natural as a projected photo on the other hand very much depends on your grooming skills.

DustyShinigami

Thanks for the advice, guys. This has certainly given me something to consider. I may have to look into a beard cap instead. The texture I did manage to find of this online looks to be 2K according to Photoshop. So unless they did everything at 4K first and then down-scaled...? With my last real-time character, I had the head and hands on a 4K texture sheet. Wouldn't that be enough resolution to bake on a groom...?

If I did bake onto the mesh, would I need to bake it on before any texturing and then work around it with an ID map...?

Thanks