Afro Hair Alpha Problems

Nemecys

Hey guys just progressing through after my last model and currently this is where i stand,

I've been looking at the Varga hair tutorial and a few others, Ive done alphas before but few and far between, so I'm not sure if I'm missing a totally obvious step.



Each picture is linked to the material preset below it, just to show you whats happening and what my textures include, heres the alpha and texture i used





Hopefulyl this is more than enough for you guys to tell me whats wrong, sorry its so messy i tried to clean up the layout and make the pics smaller but i failed

throttlekitty

I think this is a bad solution for the style, an afro doesn't really have that much visible depth to it. Just deform a sphere and go from there.

If you wanted a bit of depth, pull in verts here and there to create divots. use (mostly) parallel patches on top of those divots with transparency in the texture.

Ace-Angel

RT shaders don't sort properly, especially with heavily overlapping hairs like that.

Either render it, or use an engine that supports proper sorting orders.

Nemecys

Ahh okay, yea the only reason im doing it likes this, is because i was highly recommended by my tutors to use the Varga tutorial and go from there but yeah, it is a lot more hassle than its worth this way it seems, seen as im not even using Maya

Edit:

Im trying the sphere technique, but im having trouble deciding the best way i should unwrap it really, anyone got any advice i tried the spherical unwrap in max it looks terrible, and im thinking half and half but im not sure which halfs to put where for best effect...

Edit 2:

Fixed

thomasp

what's the sphere technique?

anyway for a project like this i'd recommend to look beyond the usual poly hair techniques and rather to have a look at polyshells they way they were used on the fur on shadow of the colossus. (www.ninjadodo.net/temp/making_of_sotc.pdf)

it would require creating the textures from tiny tiling texture snippets containing mostly noise and alpha channels - filled with dot-patterns decreasing in coverage.
texture-memory-wise it should turn out fairly cheap but to manipulate the length of the hair "strands" you'll need to add multiple layers of shells which can get dense fairly quickly.
if the textures were colored subtly different from inner to outer layer(s), you could achieve some sort of fake AO/selfshadowing effect.

also, to some degree it's possible to make the hair fall a certain way by gradually shifting the UV's or vertices of each layer (easy in max by copying modifiers across the hair-layers). not totally convincing in closeup, obviously.

another thing that would make sense is to paint/bake some hairstrands onto the skin where it meets the hairobject to better hide the geometry-layers and have a less CG-looking transition.

anyway, i did a few tests recently since my current project might require a few afros. the image below is a testasset with five hair-layers shown in marmoset toolbag, using three materials: one without alpha-mask and two masked with dot patterns as described above.
using tiling textures seems crucial to me since afro's require such a fine texture resolution that it would be a waste to create them as unique texture sheets.

the test-asset here uses alpha-to-coverage and SSAO but i tested at work with the xoliul-shader and 1-bit alpha and that works ok too.

mLichy

that looks nice ^

cptSwing

agreed!

pior

From what I remember the Varga tutorial would work okay for a render, but not at all for realtime.

If anything, start it out by modeling the hair like a regular object, and then gradually adjust and add alpha planes.

Nemecys

I really wish i had the time to do this, i have 5 days to finish an animation and this head and place it into UDK, maybe if i get some time after ill give this method a shot cause it does look pretty damn legit....

Edit:

Also my Xol viewport model looks so poor, im comparison to yours, is this something to do with the texture size or the way max is in viewport?


The texture is 2048/2048 so im a bit upset it looks so wierd