[advice needed] hair solutions

As thew topic says, I’m looking for advice on hair model solutions, not so much for myself, but for a friend who is learning

I know the common way to craft hair for models is using flat planes and apply maps to it

Are there any other methods to help make realistic looking hair?

Also, has anyone use one of these extensions before?

http://www.joealter.com/shave.htm

http://www.hair-farm.com/modeling.php

use nvidia hairworks it’s really great

isn’t that an SDK kit, where you need to code it into whatever you’re working on?

you don’t need to code it just download this version of unreal 4 that come up with hairworks see some examples and start using it “https://github.com/NvPhysX/UnrealEngine/tree/HairWorks

HairWorks reminds me of AMD’s TressFX Hair

though, I’m reading that the Nvidia stuff isn’t really optimized to work with AMD, which is what I use, so I"m not sure if that’s something I should be using, unless the Unreal team or someone optimized it for the game engine

Do both HairWorks anf TressFX Hair allow for modeling? I was never too sure what TressFX even did because you could only download something that wasn’t ready for Maya or whatever

In the maya tutorial for HairWorks, the guy is using Shave and Haircut, do you need that?

For maya I can’t answer that. But for 3dsmax you can use the Hair and Fur modifier without problems, basically you can use any plugin or tool you want as long as the end representation can be converted into splines. You only want to export the guide lines, not all the individual hairs, as HairWorks will fill in the gaps.

There is currently no plugin for Blender, but as the apx format is just xml, I am thinking of writing a plugin to do so, or focusing my attention more on an editor in UE4 for creating hair, with options similar to hair plugins for 3dsmax/maya/etc.

should make the plug-in for Blender, as convenient as it sounds to do hair directly inside on Unreal, I don’t think you should do it since it’s not modeling software. Would make better sense to make a plug-in to make HairWorks and TressFX (when v3 is public, they said it’ll have a Maya plug-in) optimized in Unreal or something

I take back what I said, but I don’t it should be for hair (leave that for the modeling software), but instead make a grass engine

Hi, did you write a script to export guides lines from blender to hairworks viewer ? i will be very interested about that :smiley:

I’ve started working on HairWorks exporter for Blender. Details on this thread: HairWorks Exporter For Blender - General Discussion - Unreal Engine Forums

thank you, I’ll look at it