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Hair Cards - Feedback

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OssennaAsterisk polycounter lvl 2

I've just finished my second project attempting hair cards, it's something I'm wanting to try and improve on to be a better character artist. I would really appreciate feedback anyone has because it's a difficult thing to get right, and I want to improve!

I used xgen to generate the hair and marmoset to bake the hair cards. I then used a mix of Blender and Maya to place the cards and rendered the shots in UE4. I used Digital Humans hair blueprint setup and a face base mesh to demo the hair. Total 5,800 tris



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  • Fabi_G
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    Fabi_G insane polycounter

    Hey 🙂 If your goal is to create hair for an modern console/pc game, you can certainly use more geometry.

    I think the hairstyle looks quite loose and bit random. Do you have reference images? I would also add them, so it's clear what you are working towards.

    The hairs' shading appears a bit flat and matte. Maybe you can find a good reference hair project for UE4 (meshes, shader and textures) and create your own hairstyle following the projects specifications (you could also pick apart the shader, if you are interesting in the tech art).

  • OssennaAsterisk
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    OssennaAsterisk polycounter lvl 2

    Hey! Thankyou for taking the time to leave feedback, I've added the reference image for context now. That's a really good idea, backward engineering a hair project to see how they did it, and trying to replicate their techniques. I'll definitely have a go at that :)

  • Fabi_G
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    Fabi_G insane polycounter

    hey! Cool to see the reference. I'd search real life solutions for this style, from multiple angles and break it down (overpaints, 3D blockout).

    As non hair expert, I'd split the hair creation process (using cards) into these sub-tasks:

    • Hairstyle Research and Breakdown, Shape/Volume Blockout
    • Implementation in engine/shader (dictates specifications for other stages: what data is stored how? Adapt existing implementation?)
    • Create hair textures
    • Create and place hair cards (placement and groom using hair particles?)
    • Setup in engine

    The steps can be researched independently, but also the dependencies. I imagine one needs to go through this process a few times to figure out the challenges and solutions. I'm sure there are also some detailed tutorials out there, but one still has to understand and apply it.

    Much success 🙂

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