Achieving FF Agni Philosophy Hair in UE4

[anonymous_user_b0cf5855]

@;694929

Manual animation for hair takes a long process of setting up a proper rig with many custom controls so that the animators can work it (these are not done on spline directly per say) but rather a single bone chain affecting multiple strands and so on, UE is not such a tool and if it was it would need to have an enormous and very mature rigging/animation pipeline which obviously it doesn’t, In addition to the hand animated hair controls, the hair can also be tied into cloth or hair dynamics system inside the 3d application of choice Maya/Max/Blender to give the “first pass” animation, (note these dynamics systems are nothing like any real time engine can produce, they have many sub samples and are stable as well as can collide with objects properly), after this process the animator puts in the additive touches to finalize the work before its pre-baked and exported.

Also note that these hairs are geometry based for the most part and not like TressFX or Hairworks.

Also note the eyelashes are individual strands of complete geometry and not texture mapped, this is a smart choice for hero characters and gives far better results for both close up and far shots as texture based eyelashes on a flat geometry or planes will ultimately fade away on many angles and this result can change characters expressiveness and eye shade levels which changes their expressions.

So basically what youre saying is that, as long as it for a cinematic (even though it is real time rendered in a game engine)
We can basically use Maya to do hair animations and then export those animations into UE4?

This way we can still get that nice hair animation but just with a different program and not throughout the game, but only for the cinematic sequences of it right?

I guess its similar to Mocap where everything is transferred into Maya first, so the animation will always be the same, and then exported into the game engine?