Fur an Hair in Unreal engine

I recently wanted to create animals with good looking fur. However when I searched for it I found NeoFur plugin which costs a lot for me and it is per project also I found another technique called Shell and Fin technique but I don’t really know how well it will perform. Then I found there is Nvidia Hairworks but the thing is plugin is for 3ds max or Maya. Is it the only way to use Nvidia hairworks because I may not afford a full licensed 3ds max or Maya.
Or is there any other way? I would be glad with every reply.

Below depends on what you perceive to be “good looking fur/hair”.

My opinion:

NeoFur: Only works OK on very short fur and depending on the art direction + type of style it may not be suitable for certain looks as it still feels very flickery and as if displacement is applied with some noise, especially for longer fur setups.

Shell technique: Is again a big trade off and depends, if you are planning anything in the range of long fur, the results wont be satisfactory, but mixed with planes maybe it will add to something in the back layer.

Nvidia hair: In my opinion may work OK for fur in some situations. But I think the whole thing still looks bad to mediocre both as hair and fur, plus enormous performance cost which is not justifiable. Maybe in the future they will improve it, but I don’t see it coming anytime soon. Couple that with lack of control over its dynamics/animation makes it a big iffy to no choice for real production + art direction.

Custom planes manual setup and texture paint job +Unreal hair shader: So far this is the way to go, it has been so for ages long in gaming and it continues to be the best option, no way around creating decent looking hair/fur, just like anything else you have to sit your butt down and model the thing just like they do in other games. Good references are Uncharted, The Last of Us.

Thank you for your thoughtful answer. It answered most of the questions I had in my mind. One thing, it would be great if you have a few links that are related to the last bulletpoint you wrote about (Custom planes manual setup and texture paint job +Unreal hair shader)

I have been testing many options for hair, trying to achieve a good result;
So far, Unreal Hair shader is the best option on UE4 for me… it renders faster (although it is expensive to render too) than the other options available.
The drawback is kind of annoying to paint hair alpha textures and it’s not so easy to make them look right.

After ditching Hairworks and other solutions, the best result I’ve got so far with the Unreal Hair shader was this, but it’s still bad and I intend to redo the whole thing again this time using a bit different workflow (once I learn to paint alpha textures in a way that look natural with this shader):

So if I were to create a furred animal then I need to cover whole body like this right? How about the textures I want to put?

I think the process is pretty self explanatory, don’t know of any decent tutorials.

But here are a few images that show the process:

The issue you are facing with your model has to do with:

1- The lack of texture variety in the hair. Paint hair clumped textures should help as well. Make most hairs (ex. 5 out of 6) clumped in the texture, also they need to have waves or curls within the texture as well as the geometry bends so they wont look so straight and perfect.

2 - Hair brightness issues, never make hair black, lighter the better but dark brown works also and AO will darken it further and in the shader you can control the brightness factor. Best practice is to put 3 spheres in the scene, dark grey, grey, and one reflective. In your scene the head is obviously receiving so much light but the hair is pure black, If you help the scattering with the hair sss and making the color brighter + AO as separate map multiplied gradient over root up. let the baked AO handle the self shadowing.

3 - Never make hair strands too thin in the texture, they will look like fine fur, you have to make them thicker and fewer as painted strands, Unreal will naturally eat away from the alpha + Temporal AA will thin it up more. You need to find a balance there.

It looks bad? :3 Man, i wish i could achieve this quality, care to share the workflow to achieve this result?

Everytime i see Uncharted 4 somewhere i can’t stop to dream of playing this game on PC (do’nt owe a PS4) It really looks out of this world.

[MENTION=202133] K[/MENTION] Thanks for the tips! These are exactly the issues I want to fix (but had no idea how to)!

Currently I can’t work on this, I have to finish programming tasks first; but when I finally achieve what I’m trying to do I’ll try to share the process.

Impressive how this process, using small mesh with hair blended with alpha achieve a great look. It looks so much better than anything i’ve seen from HairWorks, but i assume there must be some drawbacks too, in term of physic simulation?

Sidenote, i’ll pay real money for a course from the artists behind the Uncharted serie.

Animation or physics will work just fine, you need to setup a proper rig for them, it is actually far more preferable to do this over anything hairworks offers.

For short to long hair you have options of bones to real time cloth sim driving longer strands. Our setup includes a more complicated hair rig with many bone chains driving the hair via script and dynamics in the 3d application, later pre-baking hair physics which drive the bones and finally hand animating the adjustments and exporting it to unreal with the rest of the animations.

Awesome, i’ll go this way then. Thanks for your feedback !

This is for hair which requires far less planes than a complete fur of an animal, so we should cover the animal in planes? How can texture be applied to it?

pretty simple, alpha blended textures on the plane

sorry to sound too beginner however could you tell how it works? (Actually I’m new to this part of graphics I guess)

You’ve probably seen this thread? Quick and dirty grass shader - Content Creation - Unreal Engine Forums

Hi guys, I did everything… Downloading Binary Code for UE4, Compiling it in Visual Studio 2015, Even checked Samples given in HairWorks Folder successfully… But when I import my HairWorks file (which I exported from 3ds Max) it shows “Failed to import asset .APX file”… To just to check which one is wrong either my Exporting setting or UE4’s code, So reimported those given samples .APX files and it opened successfully… Then I realized that it’s my Exporting settings fault… These are my Screenshots of .APX and .FBX please tell me what to do… I’ve trying to get this done from 2 months… Please help me !