xgen render or real time hair for portfolio? whats better?
polycounter lvl 4
Hi,
if someone wants to be grooming artist, what is better to have on a portfolio , a real time hair(haircards) or rendered xgen ?
by better i mean what is more valuable to the industry?
Replies
Hi! If the goal is making hair for games, I would present the hair in engine/realtime renderer, because that's where it ultimately ends up and has to look good. Surely there exists sample hairshaders one could disect/use.
which industry?
xgen for movies/vfx or rather houdini or yeti, in games you will have to work with realtime, in engine rendered hair all the time.
be that sculpted, done with haircards or actual grooms.
check out metahumans, they have great hair setups, many of em likely done by airship images, they use actual alembic grooms and then as LODs very well made haircard setups.
Doesn't matter. Make it look good.
Anybody seen any grooms/particle hair being utilized outside tech demos, 'meta humans' and odd little indie game prototyping a la 'look what I made in 5 mins in UE5' so far?
All I can think of in actual commercial product is the FIFA replays. That tech may have spread into other EA sports titles for all I know. Other than that ... even the newest trailers for character centric games feature hair cards all over.
I was almost surprised to see Tekken 8 not using grooms according to the recently released trailer. That kind of game looks like exactly the sort where they should be particularly suitable. I would also expect them to show up in slow games like the quicktime focused ones a la 'Detroit'.
So far looks like this console generation will still require hair card centric content - not that I'm complaining. I've only ever been asked to deliver grooms for one project but that would have been offline rendered in-engine cinematics, nothing real-time.
Yeah they are expensive and not widely in use yet. But productions using grooms are happening and if only for LOD0
I suppose some day soon I finally have to get around to trying out the UE Matrix demo to see how well they handle that but generally speaking there should be a considerable visual downgrade when going from hair system to hair card geo mapped with stacked UVs on a texture sheet.
Using grooms as a starter has been my workflow for years now so I believe I have some experience converting back and forth and matching up a detailed groom with haircards is no easy feat in my opinion. Unless LOD1 gets called so far away that it might as well be mush.
Sounds like even more work when you'd think hair cards are time consuming enough to create as it is.