Hey everyone, lately i have been modeling fury creatures and i have noticed that Ark does good job on creating fur for them, but i couldnt put the finger on how they create the fur. The only thing that comes in to my mind, and it seems most likely is that they simply model every fur face and align them all along them body, then simply adding wind material to it to make it move. But if that is the actual method used it means that those characters have large amount of polygons. Since method seems to be working across all shader /quallity settings it would mean that there isnt any complex SM 3+ shading method going behind this.
Does anyone have more detailed or correct answer to it? Fingers crossed for NEOFUR solution to come out soon, but you never know, might need alternative.
If you don’t know how to share a color between 2 meshes perhaps hair cards are a bit too far ahead in your learning path.
That said. A hair card is literally just a piece of geometry with up to around 12 verticis thats bent about in order to provide visibility.
this geometry is then layered over the model however you see fit.
In blender, you can use a hair emitter, a mesh with an instance modifier and align to path checked, and brush a quick sculpt away - with hair length control so you can add more variation.
the base tris count of the hair card, as well as its quality (set on the hair emitter) determine the overall end cost of the mesh in tris.
The hair rendering needs a flow map to look good in Unreal. Not sure if or how to output one in Blender. Essentially you will need a custom system to get world normals onto the vertex colors, since it needs to travel with the mesh - again, if you don’t know how to get a mesh to share the color of another mesh, this is well out of your understanding - he11, its out of mine…
You can check the UE4 hair rendering docs and the hair cards content example for a quick material / base start.
Depending on your animal, a basic shell and fins implementation may look better and possibly outperform cards.
Also, the new hair and fur stuff wirh grooms - though it definitely does NOT outperform hair cards - can be made to look good.
No simple process for it.
first you crate the whole with hair particles. Then you convert the particles to a mesh, then you transfer wright paint to it by distance.
The color is not derived from the base mesh that way, but altered in engine with vertex paint.
if you unwrap the card mesh you can also run a custom paint texture on it - it is sometime useful.
To do that you need to keep the UV as it was for the hair to render correctly, and add a custom UV to the mesh which you use to filter in the base color.
As far as I’m aware, there is no way to actually sample the color and apply it to a mesh or a set of quads.
even if there was, unless you re-unwrap the mesh uv after editing the particle, every color change would affect all instances, defeating the purpose.
Thank you