Hair feedback and advice

DustyShinigami

Hi

I'd like some feedback and advice regarding my generated and baked hair. I've followed two courses now - one by Johan Lithvall and another by Andre Pires, which is a very similar workflow to Johan's. However, with the hair I've made, and since, mine always looks like straw. :-\ I've even tried adjusting the shader in Marmoset Toolbag, which I use initially just to quickly do test renders. Admittedly, with this example, I should've done some thinner and fairer chunks, including some transitional ones. But despite that - straw. It always looks super dry or wet, depending on the roughness value obviously, but looks like straw either way. And never soft, organic and natural looking.

Although I think the second example, made following the course, do look a bit softer

I've generated other maps too, such as the Normal, AO, Specular, Alpha etc

So yeah, any advice on making it soft and more natural looking would be super appreciated.

Thanks

DustyShinigami

Okay, I've gone back to the Photoshop file and tweaked the roots so they're less dark, increased the brightness, the saturation, ID etc, so it is looking somewhat better now. I will still need to check how it looks with the Unreal hair shader, too.

Fabi_G

Hi! I would look for some writeups how to setup a hair shader in your target application (hair materials in Toolbag: 1, 2), or inspect/adapt a sample project (plenty available for unreal).

Alex_J

using the dithered opacity shader in toolbag will help a lot, compared to cutout

DustyShinigami

Fabi_G said:

Hi! I would look for some writeups how to setup a hair shader in your target application (hair materials in Toolbag: 1, 2), or inspect/adapt a sample project (plenty available for unreal).

Yeah, I've been using the hair shader in Unreal and the settings I have in Marmoset are the same as what was applied in one of the courses I've been following. I also tried matching the settings from this article - https://marmoset.co/posts/how-to-create-realistic-hair-peach-fuzz-and-eyes/

DustyShinigami

Alex_J said:

using the dithered opacity shader in toolbag will help a lot, compared to cutout

Thanks for the suggestion. I thought I'd had Dither on, but it was indeed set to Cutout. It does look slightly softer/better now as a result.

CheeseOnToast

Anisotropy and some kind of subsurface / volumetric scattering make a world of difference. If you already have anisotropy on in the shader, you'll need to play around with your roughness values and anisotropic amount a bit, as it's not at all visible in your shots.

DustyShinigami

CheeseOnToast said:

Anisotropy and some kind of subsurface / volumetric scattering make a world of difference. If you already have anisotropy on in the shader, you'll need to play around with your roughness values and anisotropic amount a bit, as it's not at all visible in your shots.

Hi. Yep, I've been playing around with those settings too. Since setting it to Dither it has made a world of difference, but these are the Anisotropy and Subsurface settings I have at the moment and how it's currently looking:

kanga

Here is the Hairtool addon for Blender. This looks like the kind of result you might be after. It comes with a hair card and a hair material that includes a normal map. I havent read, but are you using a normal map? The hair in your examples looks dead and has no depth. There is a lot of documentation for hairtool. There might be stuff in there that could help.

DustyShinigami

kanga said:

Here is the Hairtool addon for Blender. This looks like the kind of result you might be after. It comes with a hair card and a hair material that includes a normal map. I havent read, but are you using a normal map? The hair in your examples looks dead and has no depth. There is a lot of documentation for hairtool. There might be stuff in there that could help.

Oooh, that looks really nice! I definitely need to re-learn Blender and try some of these new tools I've come across.

But yes, I have a Normal map. These are the maps I have:



I think there's 2 root maps in there so I could blend a couple together to get a better result.