Anisotropic Polygon Hair

Hello and thanks for your time. The characters I have designed for my game use polygon hair and I really want the stylization of this over hair cards however I am struggling with finding a material solution that doesn’t make lighting look poor on the hair.

Does UE4/5 have any way to achieve anistrophy reflections on polygon hair that works with real game lighting? I have been unable whatsoever to get the new anistrophy + tangent plugs on the default material to create any visible result in UE5. (literally nothing changes no matter what mix of scalar / vectors i plug in)

I have found a few examples that use a fake lighting vector to achieve it but the fake lighting vector is not ideal and the creation of the tangent / shift maps is not well documented. I am able to bake out all the maps for hair cards and use that with the default hair shader but would really prefer to use my polygon hair. As a note I am confident enough to do any part of the 3D workflow and can program C++ well but I don’t feel comfortable or knowledgeable enough to make changes to the engine source code.

Does anyone have any experience with this that could lend me some advice or point me in the right direction? Also does anyone know what fortnite does for their polygon hair?