Hair FX Shader?character hair (next geny)

seforin

Ok well I remember reading a while back that the guys who made gears of war used HAIR FX to render out there hair for there characters, basically using the same methods of max render to texture with the hair modifier but with more bells and whistles.


now the thing is I have looked around for a version of this program and have not found any sort of trial version it, so I dont want to spend money on a program I dont even understand.

has anyone played with this program at all?


OPTIONALLY:

Does anyone know a better method to do low polygonal hair other than hand painting and using max's hair/fur modifier (IE Other method/ work flows that work best?)

thnom

Pro Evolution 2008 has plenty of hairstyles. Long, Short, Medium; all different styles.

FAT_CAP

Gears of War hair was setup using the MAX hair and fur modifier as far as I know - at least thats what they used when they showed the mini-tutorial for hair in UE3 after gears came out.

Mark Dygert

http://www.vigville.com/tutorials/hair/

Renaud Galand

FAT_CAP : I saw a tutorial about the hair in GoW, but it wasn't with hair 'n fur plugin. Basically, the guy had a lib of small/medium/long alpha planes to play with and that's all.

@ work we're trying to get a real next-gen effect for hairs, with real time physics, anisotropy and based on a spline rendering system. I'm not sure I can say/show much atm. But SOON :]

thomasp

seems alphas have only gotten trickier in this console generation, insanely expensive to render over here. i was told that a certain high-end console has a harder time to render alphas than it's seven, eight year old predecessor...

at the same time anisotropic highlights and the new lighting and postprocessing systems imo only expose the tricks you could get away with earlier. now you can get nasty seams everywhere and floating, blurred hairplanes for free! not to mention the good old problems in interaction of the haircut with a heavily alpha-mapped background are still around. this gen so far does seem to suffer from a very bad hair day syndrome. *sigh*

i saw that character's hair posted up above in GoW's editor a couple of days ago and it stood out as a fake like nothing else. only the dark haired guy's similar style worked ok.

good luck with the spline rendering approach, hopefully it will not be programmer art in the end.

seforin

well then whats the best effect you guys suggest, a spline modeling method for hair?

never seen good results with that (What do you suggest with everything as far how to go about that?Other than vigs mini tutorial ? )

Toomas

There is no good way to do long hair, even nVidia's and ATI's tech demo girls have short hair.

rebb

Actually, this one has really long hair : http://nzone.nvidia.com/object/nzone_nalu_home.html

Rick Stirling

Hair is still a bitch. Not only is layered alpha still a bugger to sort, but when you start using long hair styles, you then need to make it deform properly, you need to try to make it flow over-not-through shoulders, hang with gravity, slide over itself...

Or you keep it cropped short for the most part.

FAT_CAP

@ Renaud Galand: Yeah sorry maybe I should have explained better but the tutorials I have seen for GOW are using sets of alpha plains for hair but the actual hair texture is rendered from the Hair/ Fur plugin from MAX.

The hair in GOW is all unlit 1-bit alpha as far as I can remember - you can't have a lit alpha material on a skeletal mesh- so thats why the lighter hair looks worse than the darker hair.

Rick Stirling

The GoW hair looks like 8-bit alpha in the D'Artiste book, of course that doesn't mean it still is by the time it actually gets into the game.

1-bit/punchthrough/alphatest saves you from a load of issues.

FAT_CAP

Yeah I could be wrong - the dark hair could be multi-bit as it doesn't need lighting - it's been a while since I looked though.

seforin

Man it seems the people who can hand paint hair still have the advantage here

Rick Stirling

[ QUOTE ]
Man it seems the people who can hand paint hair still have the advantage here

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No. The people that learn to use the new tech to make good hair have the advantage.

seforin

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Man it seems the people who can hand paint hair still have the advantage here

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No. The people that learn to use the new tech to make good hair have the advantage.

[/ QUOTE ]

well god damnit share , because so far sculpting hair, and spline modeling it aint working well!

Eric Chadwick

Wasn't there a japanese video nto too long ago (purportedly) showing solid snake with uber-high-res hair?

seforin

Like a tech demo or a ingame video?

SouL

I have yet to see "next-gen" hair that looks better than these hand painted ones from FFXII.



I don't know if this is an actual in game screenshots... but if it is, I wouldn't be surprised if her hair is simply hand-painted with a lot of finesse.

EarthQuake

Yeah well thats all fine and dandy, except you completely missed the point of the thread, how do you make good looking hair on hardware that cant do alphablend?

CrazyButcher

nearly every system out there can do blending very efficiently. and I doubt that latest ones are any worse than before (simply as particles are rendered blended and tons of gui elements as well)

It is more the engine's lighting issue, that makes alphablend very ugly to handle. If a pixel is always solid you can just multipass, read depth whatever. But once its transparent it makes it much harder to deal with. Hence many late engines with complex shading try to get around using it. So it's less a particular hardware, more the general way how something is approached. (besides floating point blending is still slower, then with 8-bit targets)

so its not like latest card are "worse" than the aged, its simply the load of work + higher precisions + lot more complex shading, that is the result of it being "worse" compared to the other rendered stuff.

SouL

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Yeah well thats all fine and dandy, except you completely missed the point of the thread, how do you make good looking hair on hardware that cant do alphablend?

[/ QUOTE ]

Then do solid textured hair. You can do whatever hairstyle you like... it just won't have a soft feathered edge.

seforin

I freakin hate hair ¬_¬

SuperOstrich

[ QUOTE ]
Yeah well thats all fine and dandy, except you completely missed the point of the thread, how do you make good looking hair on hardware that cant do alphablend?

[/ QUOTE ]

Guitar Hero 3 has alphablend on all of our hairs. We have the occasional issue with sorting with DOF, but other than that we have the sorting issues solved. However, using alpha in the hair is way more expensive on the GPU than using 1-bit alpha. Basically it's exactly like CrazyButcher said.

pior

Oh by the way there is something I have been wondering about for some time now especially looking at FF(insertnumberhere) screens and couldn't find an answer anywhere. Not really a sorting question (I wouldn't be much surprised to hear that Square hires someone to individually edit the vertex index of characters hair strands so that they sort okay!), more of a filtering question.

Question is, are these hair transparency maps really painted using gradual shades of black to white? Or is it some kind of super efficient filtering technique applied to pure black and white 'mask' maps? I know the effect usually produced by so-called 'classic' filtering on masked textures which gives a kind of transparent, rounded corners look but I don't see this at all in the screenshots posted above. Ideas?

Eric Chadwick

Well there is something called Alpha Coverage. It is basically alpha-test, so it solves the sorting problem. But it adds multisampling. The Limitation is that the number of alpha levels depends on how many samples taken. So if you take 4 samples you get 5 levels of alpha... 0, .25, .5, .75, 1. Six samples gives 7 levels of gray/alpha... 0, 1/6, 2/6, etc.

Check out an example from Humus:
http://www.humus.ca/index.php?page=3D&ID=61

We don't have this in yet, but apparently it's very do-able. Not sure what FF uses, looks softer than vanilla alpah-test though.