Been searching around for a comfortable hair modeling flow.
Of all the new AAA games out there, the hair cards are freely intersecting without much visible drawback, but any tutorial on the matter emphasize the importance of keeping them clean and mostly separated.
In reality this is the huge concrete wall between a smooth workflow and a tedious nightmare. I can make really good textures, UV map planes and use various methods for laying out cards in a timely manner, but not without intersection. Is it really important?
Another problem I came to think of, is that if hair cards are placed with millimeter accuracy to avoid intersection, when it comes to long hairstyles, that would fail as soon as the hair has some form of physics or weightpainting in animation…
Duy- If you’re talking about the “Hair Tool”, I have it and use it, but the intersection is still a manual problem
Can someone say if this is related to shading?
Uncharted 4 has great hair, but the cards is an intersecting mess (put in a system).
Various sources say that to eliminate intersecting normals on the cards, a primitive mesh of the hair is placed as a normal reference for baking new normal maps. I can see how this fixes some of the problem, but when using overlapping UVs to save texture space, this method seems useless.
This is what I’ve got at the moment. I am happy with the overall shape, but it doesn’t render well.
You can intersect cards in UE4 because its hair material uses a POM style technique that blends the strands of hair in different cards based on a heightmap rendering of the hair texture on that card.
Thank you for the links grimZA I’ll check them out
I have this tutorial https://gumroad.com/l/pDpQi and what he does is amazing, but he doesn’t go in depth about the card placing, just that it takes time, and he avoids intersection (at least the visible ones).
The problem I have with this is that since the cards are so neatly placed in layers, changing one of them would force you to readjust the others, and that is a very linear workflow that requires detailed planning or a reference sculpt. He doesn’t explain this process.
