Hi there, I’m currently making a bunch of armor sets and I want to make a helmet with a crest. For those unaware, it’s the feathery/hairy stuff you sometimes see on helmets.
I’m trying to achieve this look, it’s thousands of tiny hairs, and I want it to not be totally static in game. I don’t think having thousands of tiny cylinders would be good for performance especially with any physics applied to them, so I could use some tips. I think it would be similar if someone had made a paintbrush or a broom, for example. Thanks.
if this was me i would go by this;
model a flat solid object on the shape of the hair, thin uplay an alpha texture that reblecate the hair,and doblecate it more than one,s
thin you have to do one of 2, eather make the object as a softbody or just rigg it and animate the rigg
I’ve followed this video and come up with this result, but I have a few complaints. Mainly, it just doesn’t look very natural. There’s no space between the hairs for instance, and from the direct side, it’s also invisible since it’s a plane.
If I solidify it, the “tips” of the hair looks bad and then the overall shape is too neat. I need some more ideas or video links. This is close but there has to be something better.
Edit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=310974586 This is an example of the same helmet in a game, they seem to have used multiple planes as well, so I’m close, but theirs has splits near the edges and kinda frills out at the end. I see they just colored the “base” part of the helmet the same color as the crest to distract, as well as angling the crest’s curve to kinda cover it.
If someone could direct me how to achieve that type of edge, that would be very helpful.
You can get decent enough hair with curves. Look into it.
Main idea, create two bezier curves and a bezier circle. Use second curve as taper object on first curve, circle as bevel object. Turn down the resolution on the curves and circle.
That gets you a basic lock of hair that you can duplicate to create complex patterns.
Obviously, this will get you a higher polycount. The trick is mixing thick locks with thinner ones to create the illusion of “bushiness” (if that’s a word) so you don’t wind up using quite as many curves. Once you’re done, Alt+C->mesh from curve. Then simplify mesh.
A good method is ctrl+alt->select edges. That gets you an edge ring. Then you can go to select->checker deselect, then select->select loops->edge loops. Finally, delete the edge loops. That makes the shape less round, but doesn’t fuck up your vertex count.
You could also do decime modifier maybe, but results may not be quite as good.
Go as lowpoly as you can. Here I got away using 400~ verts for the hair. 4 curves total.
While that is one way, it’s not really effective for what I’m trying to achieve, unfortunately.I’m pretty sure I do want to go with the 2d planes, but I want them to be more detailed. I swear I saw a way to make parts of the plane transparent so you could basically have a PNG in 3d space.
It depends on what you mean by “game”.
If you’re developing, rebuild the material inside your chosen engine.
If you’re making a mod, you’ll have to look thru modding community forums for that specific game.
There’s no one tool for modding. You’ll likely have to learn a bunch of different programs.
Well, I usually export from Blender to 3dCoat, then to UE4, so I’m actually not sure how to export a texture, specifically made for an object in Blender, to 3dCoat/UE4.
I suppose so. I’ll be honest though, I’m having a hard time figuring out an idea to make my crest look right. I want the edge to have that “split ends” look.
I guess I need to spend a lot more time on this than I thought, generate the image in Blender, then make it have transparency with Gimp and then finally apply it in engine… then figure out how to combine it in 3dCoat with the other parts of the model’s textures.
Do you know of any way that I could make the actual object’s vertices line up with the mask I’ve drawn, once completed? It would make coloring/texturing it easier as I couldn’t accidentally draw “outside” of the guidelines. I suppose I could probably make the outline myself, but sometimes there’s cool automatic stuff in Blender.
I don’t understand the question. The mesh is only visible where covered by the mask. So if you paint outside the mask, the paint is not visible. Makes sense?