HAIR!?

prolow

i saw some good hair examples from some of the entries in comicon challenge 2010, and the varga tut is a widely referenced method, but I think this topic needs exploring further by artist & engineers, or perhaps I just need more practice:)

and another texture example I made with finer hairs

Snowfly

Here's a UE3 based example I'm going through at the moment-

http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/anisotropic-shader-for-hair/

haikai

May I ask how you generated your direction map for the anisotropic highlights?

The hair looks pretty good, but for some reason the anisotropic highlights aren't really apparent in the viewport render.

prolow

thanks Snowfly, reading it now myself

haikai: I did it maya but could probably be done in most programs, the baked direction map is possible since the hair "strands" are geometry, the strands UV lay out is so the length runs vertically, in maya there is a shader node called Sampler Info, you can use the v tangent output from it to render the strands direction, in the examples i have the uvs all ran top to bottom, but if they where bottom to top the direction map image would be mostly green, the resulting effect is the same though.
and also true, the effect isn't very apparent in the final render, it may have something to do how broken up the surface is

Snowfly

Just a Q about the directional map, what's the channel breakdown for it? The ones I've seen use red for horizontal, and blue for vertical, but these were simple anisotropic direction maps that were hand painted and only deal with flat surfaces. Any idea why the green comes out so strong on the tips?

edit: I kinda answered my own question about the channel breakdown there didn't I? :shifty:

And yeah like haikai I wasn't sure if you had your final render posted. Agreed that it would be interesting to see with stronger highlights.

prolow

yeah, the tips turn green because they turn in the opposite direction,
I didn't bake the maps per say i just rendered them in the viewport, trying to actually bake them now onto other geometry, in this case a christmas ball , and having some trouble, for 1 maya crashes with the tangentVcamera output, but not with tangentUcamera, which if the my logic is correct, if the source uv's run along the U direction would yield the same results, but so far i'm not getting it to look right

prolow

well just came across this ->
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8CUSiPDJ0[/ame]
apparently this plainer hair bs will end relatively soon and we can all become programmers to make hair, cause that ain't modeled

almighty_gir

you can UVW map in max, send it to zbrush, subdivide it up to like 7-8 times or whatever (make sure you do the morph target trick to hold it's boundaries properly for the first 2-3 subdivisions). fill it with black colour, then just paint onto it using standard brush at like 20 z-level and 75 rgb-level.

export the mesh and bake to normals, export the polypaint as texture. no fuss.