RTT/Bake 'Hair and Fur [WSM]'

eboy

Can anyone here explain Squirrely Jones's method of baking fur to diffuse? You can see what I'm talking about here. Scroll down to his bottom images.


I've setup my fur and I understand the whole RTT panel. So don't need explanation for this. I've just never tried baking in fur. Or maybe its a different method?

Cheers,

Rheece

eboy

Nevermind. I believe he would have combed it on a single plane and then rendered.

If there is a method with RTT then let me know. Although I don't think its probable.

Sage

By the way your question spark my curiosity so I decided to see if i could figure it out. I didn't try to bake but if you look in the tools section there is a to convert hairs to splines, and hair to mesh. do that and it creates an 3d mesh of your hair. I'm think you should be able to bake that now. Let me know how it goes.

eboy

Ah that is a good idea actually.

Although I first tried converting 100,000 hairs into splines. Maybe thats too much but it still doesn't really cover my model properly.

Anyway when just trying to render my system runs out of memory. I've only got 2 gig. Did you try and render one yourself?

Sage

you can limit how many segments the mesh has and hair has. I only tried with 1600 hairs so I don't know. You might have to render the hairs alone though and composite them with an alpha in photoshop. So in max render the hair with RTT with only the hairs visible. I have rendere 200,000 polys, if I remember correctly with only two gigs so it should work without much effort. It might take a fe minutes to render though. Or you might have to do it in chunks if you need more hair. Make a few sets and see how it goes. The only draw back I saw off the bat with turning the hair into mesh was that it loses the hair material. I just rendered with the default material and played with the spec. You might benefit from adding a noise map to the bump and spec level channel so you can get a nice lighting, the noise would have to be small though. It may or may not work. I used to fake hair with nose maps. LOL

eboy

Haha, brilliant. Noise map to fake hair.

I think I'll first just try combing the hairs on a flat plane and render textures that way. Overall I think it would be faster and achieve better results. Although it would be interesting to try your method with RTT. I may give it a go later out of curiosity.

Cheers Sage.

Sage

the small and noise map in the bump and spec level channel is to break up the highlights. when you make the hair a mesh it loses the hair material. I didn't try it though, it might be too small to make a difference though unless you get fairly close.

Well when I used noise to make short hair, beards, eyebrows, it looked fairly bad, Well it was good enough to dazzle some of my peers and professors. LOL I would not do it now but I would combine it with opacity maps, so it was similar to painting hair in photoshop with a custom brush. I did make it several layers deep so it didn't just look like noise. At the time I didn't know how to unwrap things properly so I went that route.

Alex

eboy

Yea I'll throw a noise in there for the bump and spec to break up the highlights a bit like you said.

Also I think its safe to say we've all done some fairly dodgey things when learning new methods or whatever haha.