Hair and Eye help.

Baj Singh

Ahoy.

I've always had a problem regarding hair and eyes even after looking as such great tutorials such as Paul Tosca's Vargas.

I finished this guy today however I don't feel that his eyes and hair came out as good as they could have. I was wondering if anyone had any good tips/workflow ideas regarding both of these features.



Some other questions I do have as are:

* Do you usually paint a base for the hair on a characters bald head and then use planes as filler or just use planes to create the entirety of the hair.
* For the eyes, do you usually paint the specular highlights in the diffuse or just paint them in the specular map.
* How do you go about painting the specular on the hair to get that right amount of shine.
* Is there a good way to have multiple planes with alpha maps overlay in the Marmoset engine without any weird glitching?

Thanks in advance.

JordanW

You should paint a base on the head of hair, I dont think you could make planes dense enough to hide skin color

You shouldnt paint highlights on the diffuse or specular of the eye, the eye should have a solid color for it's specular so that it gets the fine circular specular, If you're using an avanced shader you could end up painting a specular map for the iris then have the clearcoat use a solid color for it's specular and or a reflection map

Hair specular is tricky, it -should- be anisotropic but getting shaders that support that is tricky, it's usually a broad+fine shine that is more saturated than the diffuse

GarageBay9

Eye specular highlights need to be relatively high resolution environment maps with large shaped white spots near the center to depict the light sources that are reflecting on the eye.

What we expect to see when we look at an eye is a tiny reflection of the world behind us. Painting a specular map can work, but the best results I have seen were always 256 or even 512 environment maps that had large 'light sources' to produce the appearance of 'specular' highlights when they were applied.

What you will want to do is mix or mask that environment map so that the brighter a pixel is, the more opaque it is in the overlay. If you want to get fancy you can calculate fresnel falloff and similar parameters, too.

Baj Singh

Thanks for the responses.

However, I was wondering what the best solution (for both issues would be) if I were to say take it into something like marmoset toolbag where a lot of those features aren't present? For example, a Dominance War entry?

rooster

great character
it looks like you've done the big no-no of mirroring your eye textures, meaning the spec highlights are on opposite sides of each eye. If you have to paint the eye spec, be sure not to mirror the eye texture or it looks weird and bong-eyed. Less noticable when you've got the spec so close to the center though