@kalakus My jeans are clipping a little, is there a way I can fix this?
yes, you need to apply the mask on the male skin material
This is my first finding on the hair shader. It indeed improves messing with specular values that Im showing in this short video:
UE4 - Character Customizer - hair shader discussion (not a tutorial) - YouTube video do show some nipples, so if this offend you, do not watch!!
I need to do some hard debugging in one of my project and I will get back with this soon.
I took the freedom to show-off the video (all as WIP for the @mlindborg ) at twitter and also point to this thread. If you think I crossed some border, just let me know.
Just so you know, the scatter parameter is set dynamically based on the lightness value of the color you choose
In CC_hair_color_picker
In this case the scatter should be a base value and have something added as a shift, probably same for specular. In real life, men and women does that light effect on hair with strains lighter than some others, this type of effect I will model later and add specular contribution for the lighter strains… the effect would be even better if AO is adopted, but again, I think for the sake of cheap material have different materials set is better than a one material with tons of different applications, I mean, if the style is realistic, then one material for realistic, if the style is a little bit more stylized, then another material for that. This can change once material layers are released in the future, but I will not mess with this right now.
Despite the name the scatter parameter doesn’t affect the scattering, it just makes the hair brighter, as it says here Engine Feature Examples for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation
That’s why I was looking for a way to alter the scattering (not the parameter) so I can disable shadows
I have read the documentation… it is funny how they are not changing the metallic pin name to scatter, since it is not metallic in nature for hair shader, I think still specular is necessary to add, it causes improvement on the single hair strand visualization when observing the surface while perpendicular to the light direction. A very interesting point thou is if you do check the Paragon character Twinblast, which was the character used in that documentation (now you can download it free and the material is there complete and updated regarding that documentation), they are putting 1 into specular or if you choose a mask (parameter) then they are giving near 1 to the middle of the strand and darker to the root and tip, which seems ok. Clearcoat (backlit) is receiving same values from the AO texture, scatter with a value is being used in low profile quality settings and with high profile it is coming from texture but only red channel.
Man, this presentation at GDC 2018 is an excellent source for techniques!! It is another level of implementation of course, but some tricks are doable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OuCrbwEJW4
enjoy!
Most of it is about scanning and mocap and what not. They do talk about baked shadow maps which leads me to believe they have some alternative solution for hair shading but they don’t mention that at all.
There is a lot of info for hair in the video, some scattered along, but includes: hair (created in Maya with XGen), painted gray hair, skin hair (nice trick), show some partial material, some the textures and some trick nodes, it is just tiresome to watch everything to just see what the most is wanted.
Any news about marketplace submission and updates?
Yeah sorry about lack of updates I was away for easter.
I’ve been redoing the head morphs a bit. Previously I just made a bunch of random shapes for different parts of the head, now instead I’m making a bunch of face presets and then splitting them into parts. Makes it easier for users to see the different types of characters you can make and makes it more artist friendly to work with if I wanna make changes to a face or add another preset.
Also redoing/adding some hairstyles since I wasn’t very happy with them.
Still haven’t found a way to switch between master pose component and animation blueprint without it going out of sync so I’ll have to fix that before marketplace submission.
Once you finish this, please update the Gumroad package for us to see, better if quite ahead MP submission and even if still missing parts, so we can point out something that might not go right in review and before they accumulate too much.
Quoting, a feedback update will be really cool, also hoping you will fix the sync problem and this great content will reach the marketplace soon.
To avoid the “all clones” effect add as many variations as possible. So that the face can be changed a lot with various combos and so more unique looking characters created with it.
Has anyone made a full working character customization system with this yet? I’ve been trying all morning and failing miserably.
I experimented, but Im waiting for the full release before moving to something more “end implementation”. As it is the customization you make for one character is saved as a savegame feature. Ideally, you would save the settings in a database instead, but as it is now also works fine. Since there is no native solution for a databse inside Unreal you will need to relly on something on the MP.
What is your difficulties right now? This might help the creator to provide something as training material later. Remember this is still a WIP product. We just purchased because we want to support the creator because we feel the quality of his work is great, also most of us will implement a character customization ourselves, but we want the mesh, textures, materials to serve as a base.
Failing with?
I wasn’t quite sure how they system was laid out. I would try and spawn the relevant character, un posses the current one, delete it, then possess the freshly spawned character based off a check text. But upon doing so the controls would break and I would get errors relating to the materials. So I assumed that each menu was related to the individual character, so I tried calling the open menu function in the character blueprint but still had the same issue.
Overall I love the quality of the product and I believe the fault lies with my own short comings.
Is it a bad idea to save it as a save game?
It depends on what is your game style. It would work for a standalone game (where you just need to save progression), but won’t work on a online multiplayer one, because the last case only part of the data is saved locally, the remaining is saved in a database at the server side. Im working on my own database solution, but right now Im changing it to work asynchronously to not block the main game thread execution (geek stuff).