Generating hair and fur cards
polycounter lvl 19
Is there such a beast as a program or plugin for generating and rigging Fur or hair cards/billboards for game quality 3D meshes?
For me it’s not the modelling that’s the issue, it’s the skinning that I wouldn’t want to fathom. I really hate rigging characters :p
I know UE 4 has the ability but it’s utter shit. The billboards it generates aren’t unwrapped and even if you get it working, it’s got synchronization issues with animations. I was hoping something exists for Max or Blender that isn’t going to break the bank either.
Replies
any hair solution would do the job. ideally one that allows you to have the hair unwrapped. then instead of having individual hairs, you will use very wide ones and apply alphas to those.
skinning usually would also be automatically transferred from the skinned body. maybe with some extra magic over the course from root to tip. but that usually isn't stuff you would do by hand. in max that would likely be done with skinwrap, in maya with transfer attributes, with blender no idea, but should be possible as well.
Oh wow. I thought the hair generated by plugins like that were particle systems and not geo. Does Blender's hair have the ability to convert it into skinned geo?
i have no idea, but i would assume yes.
google says yes
so all you'd need is the ability to convert groom to geometry, which should definitely be possible.
as said, instead of doing a full bopdy groom with individual hair, you would groom with less but a lot bigger planes in mind, then apply the alphas to those planes. the cool thing is you could also use that groom to do the flowmaps for the underlying body as i showed here.
this way you can have nice anisotrpic shading on both, the base body and the haircards, it will all be in line and the cards could be lodded away without crazy shading differences to the base body.
That's awesome, thank you. I normally Google this sort of thing, but I thought it was gonna be a lot harder so I figured I'd come here for some expert advice. lol