In the midst of porting my workflow to Blender 2.8 with a test asset. I very much like that finally there's no need anymore to use another app to get a quick half-decent preview.
Thanks guy, much appreciated. It has been a long time indeed.
@bkost Not for this one - baked in Marmoset. Not expecting much I only recently checked out baking with Blender and looks like from now on I am definitely going to use it (the baking environment that comes with Hair Tool). Should speed up things quite a bit!
Hi Thomas, Awesome work ! and always inspired by your attention to details and your techniques! and i'm curious to know, what process did you do on Blender (Modelling, texturing, uv, etc), and does the Rendering also in Blender or is these in Marmoset ?
Cheers, this was my project to move from the older style Blender to 2.8 so everything was done in it and I adjusted my setup/scripts as I went along.
The render is Eevee. It's actually the look of the model in the viewport with an image plane placed behind it - no extra setup - which is what I was after (no more exporting to Marmoset for client previews to have assets look presentable).
I found Eevee also a bit superior for presenting hair (which is most of my work these days) because the contact shadows actually work in there. You can mimick an engine look a bit more easily whereas Marmoset has overall higher image quality but you are wrestling with the shadow settings. At least I tend to.
Wow, all using Blender! i'm a max user, and adapting to Blender for modelling, UV, and even sculpting would require time and patience. But you helped me to see that it's worth to try to look into again. Thanks for sharing your workflow, Thomas!~
Here are a few shots from Marmoset of something I'm currently busy with -
The head is just a random doodle of mine I had laying around but the hair was transferred from an entirely different mesh I'm actually working with (Daz 3D). I'm quite happy how that turned out (via surface deform). Some minor bugs still need resolving.
Did another of those hairstyles - texture reused from the one before. Will look into changing that at some point.
Oh and this is what I'm working with - the CVs for everything minus the hair cap. Might look a little intense but it's a million times easier than tweaking polygons to me.
There is option to generated interpolated child curve, so you could used one tenth of the hair I think (unless what you show above are the already generated curves, and not the guide particle hair).
There is option to generated interpolated child curve, so you could used one tenth of the hair I think (unless what you show above are the already generated curves, and not the guide particle hair).
Yeah that's all my hair curve CV's, I don't really do the particle styling thing in Blender (yet - feature request incoming).
Added a short-ish beard that is suitable for up-close viewing. Am currently exploring how to do different density/grey whiskers/salt & pepper look without reworking the model each time.
Well the shot further up with the many CVs - that's curves in Blender with a geometry profile, UVs and textures assigned, similar workflow to e.g. in Max when you use splines and turn on viewport rendering.
So what I'm working with is never actually a proper hair system that I style - in case you were assuming that. I'm just using some of that styling functionality that comes with hair systems early on to get the overall look, then convert the hair to curves with profiles assigned and then simply move CVs around instead of having to poly model. Converting to hair cards is just a byproduct of collapsing the stack.
This is great, it amazes me how you can make any hairstyle look natural. I am amateur Blender user. I'm trying to get my head around something here... so you make the hair with curves with geometry profile then you bake them into hair cards, right? But how is that? Do you manually place the hair cards and select the hair with groups individually baking them into the cards or is that somehow automated. Excuse me if the question may be too off. I know nothing about hair, only about baking maps from one model into another.
. gave up on hair, waay too frustrating and technical. easy enough to get a nice style in blender, but by the time you got it to poly planes it looks naff( well mine do anyway
This is great, it amazes me how you can make any hairstyle look natural. I am amateur Blender user. I'm trying to get my head around something here... so you make the hair with curves with geometry profile then you bake them into hair cards, right? But how is that? Do you manually place the hair cards and select the hair with groups individually baking them into the cards or is that somehow automated. Excuse me if the question may be too off. I know nothing about hair, only about baking maps from one model into another.
Thanks! And no - these curve profiles are the actual hair card geometry with a texture already mapped on to them. I'm mainly focused at making the geometry styling/groom process manageable, even with many hair cards so it can be used in production without prohibitively long asset creation times or the inability to tweak if a change request comes in late.
I don't care much for the hair texture, that's the easy stuff. Some people seem to still hand paint them to this day even. I just bake them from curves into texture passes in another scene altogether, similar to all those xGen tutorials you can find these days.
. gave up on hair, waay too frustrating and technical. easy enough to get a nice style in blender, but by the time you got it to poly planes it looks naff( well mine do anyway
Cheers. In my view the technical hurdles just add a bit of spice to keep the whole thing interesting. In comparison I get sleepy at the thought of doing yet another sculpt. Haven't done any full bodies in years. Too straight forward!
problem is I could spend i month making a hairstyle that I am not happy with , never seems to be a finished product
blender is pretty cool for hair , though I wish they had 'align to surface' like in maya( for the poly planes)
I think it was the twist brush or similar in xgen that did this.Blender just has a 'tilt' option, but you can't align them to parent mesh automatically?
Yes you can align but that's in the Hair Tool addon. Tilt and scale on a CV selection basis are pretty damn powerful though. Most of my time goes into tweaking the details anyway.
I'd love to see your process tutorialised. You're a well-known hair meister, I reckon you'd make a small fortune if you sold it on Artstation / gumroad if that interests you at all. I can guarantee you at least one customer (me).
I'd love to see your process tutorialised. You're a well-known hair meister, I reckon you'd make a small fortune if you sold it on Artstation / gumroad if that interests you at all. I can guarantee you at least one customer (me).
Thanks! Much appreciated.
Yeah I did look into doing a tutorial since I do receive questions about my method here or there but a) never done any vids before so would probably be looking at a lot of editing and generally learning by doing. And b) I work regularly with hair artists on commercial projects and have never ever met anybody who uses Blender.
It's Maya or bust from the looks of it. And my method is probably not feasible outside Blender anyway. At least not the crucial details.
And b) I work regularly with hair artists on commercial projects and have never ever met anybody who uses Blender.
It's Maya or bust from the looks of it. And my method is probably not feasible outside Blender anyway. At least not the crucial details.
That's why I'm interested. Everyone seems to use Xgen which looks like a messy pipeline that generates some textures but needs others baked elsewhere, etc.etc. I own the Blender hair tool but never get a chance to use it in production (I'm perpetually doing stylised stuff with sculpted hair these days). I also picked up Oliver Lau's Hair and Fur TG for substance designer which seems like a one-stop shop for non-destructive hair textures. I reckon between the two of them you could get a pretty slick bakeless workflow going.
@Sergey Romanenko I was starting to think Polycount was bugged sending me to this thread lol Nice model though, I'm surprised of how good it looks with only 15k tris
Hahaha My bad didn't realize he wasn,t the owner's thread when I frontpaged, @thomasp well at least it might have brought more people into your thread...I guess @Sergey Romanenko I'm removing the front page for now, You should be making your own thread and not posting in thomas
Wow has it been another year or what. During a cleanout of old Unreal projects I found some screenshots I took while working on characters for 'Gylt'. 2018 vintage.
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and +1 for blender
Are you baking out the hair textures in Blender as well?
I am amateur Blender user. I'm trying to get my head around something here... so you make the hair with curves with geometry profile then you bake them into hair cards, right? But how is that? Do you manually place the hair cards and select the hair with groups individually baking them into the cards or is that somehow automated.
Excuse me if the question may be too off. I know nothing about hair, only about baking maps from one model into another.
That's why I'm interested. Everyone seems to use Xgen which looks like a messy pipeline that generates some textures but needs others baked elsewhere, etc.etc. I own the Blender hair tool but never get a chance to use it in production (I'm perpetually doing stylised stuff with sculpted hair these days). I also picked up Oliver Lau's Hair and Fur TG for substance designer which seems like a one-stop shop for non-destructive hair textures. I reckon between the two of them you could get a pretty slick bakeless workflow going.
Nice model though, I'm surprised of how good it looks with only 15k tris
@thomasp well at least it might have brought more people into your thread...I guess
@Sergey Romanenko I'm removing the front page for now, You should be making your own thread and not posting in thomas