I’m new to modeling and I was going to sculpt hair on my protagonist but then I found out about Zbrush’s Fibermesh abilities. I’ve been using zbrush so I was thinking I’d just do that for hair. Would Unreal 4 be compatible with this approach? Is there anything I’d need to keep in mind when exporting the model with this kind of hair? (I’m probably going to take it into Maya for animations/rigging after this)
You can’t use that type of hair yet, currently the only option is to use planes with a hair texture on them, rather than individual hairs. There’s another thread where someone is working on adding support for a hair system and at some point Nvidia Gameworks might be integrated into UE4 and it has a hair system.
Crud. Looks like I’ll have to go back to sculpting the hair. Thanks for letting me know. I hope they integrate some kind of hair system in the future, but I’m sure they’re busy with more game features.
I’m sure there will at some point, but the old techniques should work fine, there’s some really fantastic results out there using planes for hair, doing the DX11 Samaritan demo for UDK Epic did a more complex setup for hair planes.
Is there a way to turn fiber mesh into planes? Or is that too complicated/finicky? I’ve never used planes for hair before.
Not from Zbrush, I don’t know about other programs, but for something like 3ds Max you can use the Hair modifier for your hair and then instead of hair strands you can use a mesh as your hair. You should go look at some tutorials though, I know on the UDK documentation they have a page showing how they did hair on a Gears of War character. There’s also some info on the characters from the Uncharted series and The Last of Us(I think there are articles about that on ZbrushCentral), which have very good character design and hair. I think in all of those cases they placed the hair planes by hand, (not as complicated as you think, it’s not like you need 10,000 of them or anything)
Its a Maya Tutorial but its a tool and can be translated to any other modeling program.
interesting. I just tried this using fiber mesh to to basically place all the planes. It’s way easier than doing it manually.
Im not sure whats the best way to set this up in UE4, atm it looks pretty bad in the engine but I am still adjusting to the new stuff.
Maybe I will write up a demo on it. Cheers.
GAH! KILL IT WITH FIRE!
But seriously, nice work there.
Nice work but isn’t that too many tris though? A shader solution could be cheaper.
You can do a shader for something like a horse coat, but for stuff that actually needs to be fuzzy that’s the only solution. If it’s sticking straight up out of the surface you could do a shader thing, kind of like a parallax shader.
Curious what it looks like in Unreal 4. That video you posted isn’t in UE4, is it? Also curious if you can get all the fur to move/sway as it crawls without hand-manipulating each plane.
ya i have updates, it looks not good in ue4… im still trying to sort out why.
this is the actual mesh, the other one that shows the planes was an earlier iteration. This is the same mesh as in the above video and the maya video in the previous post.
It’s just over 30k tris.
Cheers
Maybe the hair planes should be rotated 90 degrees, that way it effects the silhouette more, and then you could apply a falloff to the node so that it’s more visible from the front than the side.
@ darthviper, thats a good point… hmm, i got caught up in this test and was not paying attention to the orientation. That is important stuff. Anyone have tips/pointers on material settings? I seem to have the best result with a masked material.
Reminds me of a scene from Knightmare :eek:
Maybe it’s just the dim light but that actually looks pretty good to me. And **** that mech suit looks cool!
Cheers guys. I’m still playing with it. I reoriented most the planes. It’s better but I hope to make more improvements.
UE4 needs hair…I dont want Ken doll hair on my Chars 
I agree^
One possible solution I found is a ridiculously expensive Maya plugin that costs as much as Maya itself: http://peregrinelabs.com/yeti/
It looks really, really cool though. and it’s animation-friendly. But there has to be a better solution than plopping down over a thousand dollars.