woo, I hope i'm not unearthing this thread but, hey, any news on the last part of your tut Hazard ? I know you're busy with the design a female char and all, so it's just to poke
Amazing stuff as always, and thanks a ton for pointing to the right tuts and references.
This whole hair workflow still bothers me, though. I know this is an old thread but I'll ask just away anyway
I'm working on a character's hair at the moment and I just can't get it right. I guess smooshing individual strands around in Zbrush is easily done but how do you go about texturing them?
I'm not looking for hair painting techniques since there are a ton of them available online, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how the UV/texturing part fit into the pipeline.
Do all these strands essentially share the same UV space? How do you handle texture distortion? When do you actually unwrap the UVs and how?
manuleptit: I UVW map the strands while they are straight flat planes before sending them to Zbrush to start manipulation Some share UVW space for sure, others do not, I usually have 4 or 5 textured strands and maybe some larger textured chunks for a base
Thank you Troy for this really fast reply. I'll try this workflow on my next character. It looks really fast and powerful.
My character turned out okay. What I did was laying down a plane on the top of the head with strips and retopology from the Graphite modeling tools. When I was happy with its shape, I unwrapped it and textured it (with alpha), and started duplicating it around and shaping the new strands. When the texture got too stretched out, I simply applied another material to the new strand, unwrapped it, textured it etc. and started duplicating again.
I built up the hairstyle in layers by offsetting the new strands up each time. The Shift tool in Paint deform turned out quite useful. I ended up with 7 different strand materials/textures which I combined together into one single texture using RTT to a second UV set.
I also ended up combining them all and exported them to Zbrush. I used the move brush to shape the hairstyle more into the silhouette I was aiming for (I am working from a concept art).
Do you think this workflow makes sense or do you have any suggestion to finetune it ? Making sure the strands would not interpenetrate was quite tedious.
wow no words i can describe how awesome this thread is. Thanks for the detailed breakdown. I'm always curious on how you do the hair and eyelashes. This thread is truly a hidden gem!
Love your work
Hey guys, another issue with regards to game character hair ^^
I have tried exporting my mesh to UDK but the hair alpha sorting is just hideous.
My two options here are :
Setting the hair material Blend Mode to Masked or Soft Masked, which solves the sorting issue, at the cost of chunkier (uglier ^^) alphas.
Setting the hair material Blend Mode to Translucent, and try fixing the bad alpha sorting in the Skeletal mesh editor, which is a real pain. Most of the time it feels like you just don't know what you're doing. It gives me headaches, the hairstyle at hand being quite complex and being composed of over 80 strands.
I was wondering if sorting the alphas could be done before exporting your mesh to a game engine? Is there any kind of alpha sorting tool in Max or Maya?
Replies
Amazing work, and break down, really keen to see the PDF when it's compiled with all parts.
Should be more break downs, and quality PDF's from people who do document and share their workflow.
Just wanted to say the rest of my tut will be able to be seen in the epic booklet that Ryan is making here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=95135
Cheers and I hope its useful to at least someone!
This whole hair workflow still bothers me, though. I know this is an old thread but I'll ask just away anyway
I'm working on a character's hair at the moment and I just can't get it right. I guess smooshing individual strands around in Zbrush is easily done but how do you go about texturing them?
I'm not looking for hair painting techniques since there are a ton of them available online, but I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how the UV/texturing part fit into the pipeline.
Do all these strands essentially share the same UV space? How do you handle texture distortion? When do you actually unwrap the UVs and how?
Thanks
My character turned out okay. What I did was laying down a plane on the top of the head with strips and retopology from the Graphite modeling tools. When I was happy with its shape, I unwrapped it and textured it (with alpha), and started duplicating it around and shaping the new strands. When the texture got too stretched out, I simply applied another material to the new strand, unwrapped it, textured it etc. and started duplicating again.
I built up the hairstyle in layers by offsetting the new strands up each time. The Shift tool in Paint deform turned out quite useful. I ended up with 7 different strand materials/textures which I combined together into one single texture using RTT to a second UV set.
I also ended up combining them all and exported them to Zbrush. I used the move brush to shape the hairstyle more into the silhouette I was aiming for (I am working from a concept art).
Do you think this workflow makes sense or do you have any suggestion to finetune it
Anyway, thank you again for this valuable info
Love your work
I have tried exporting my mesh to UDK but the hair alpha sorting is just hideous.
My two options here are :
Setting the hair material Blend Mode to Masked or Soft Masked, which solves the sorting issue, at the cost of chunkier (uglier ^^) alphas.
Setting the hair material Blend Mode to Translucent, and try fixing the bad alpha sorting in the Skeletal mesh editor, which is a real pain. Most of the time it feels like you just don't know what you're doing. It gives me headaches, the hairstyle at hand being quite complex and being composed of over 80 strands.
I was wondering if sorting the alphas could be done before exporting your mesh to a game engine? Is there any kind of alpha sorting tool in Max or Maya?
Thank you!