Whoops! sorry for the slow reply, Hard Duck. Yeah, I completely agree that the beard looks a bit “Meh” compared to the rest. I need to paint the skin to alleviate that, and when I get some time I will. Thanks a lot for the compliments though, man.
So, the hair Shader, it’s a bit of a pain in the bum to get it looking nice. I’m still in two minds on what is the best approach for one particular part of it, the Tangent input.
What I know so far is that the tangent texture influences much like a normalmap, but you dont want to input a normalmap there, as it looks… bad.
This is the material setup I’m currently using, so I can experiment around with it, everything is parameterized in some way or another.
what it -does- is also a good question, I painted a “comb map” using this method: http://polycount.com/discussion/98983/how-to-paint-flow-anisotropic-comb-maps-in-photoshop
and used that as a basis to go off, seeing wether or not it looked any good.
and it does. to a certain degree. in the following example the shader is set up in such a way that it shifts between a flat normal, and the tangent texture. Left is flat normal, right is comb map. It seems to mess with the world normal, which isn’t great if you want to add normal-based effects, like a fresnel.
As for the maps I used in the shader alltogether?
one RGBA mask texture with
R: Height
G: Root Color
B: AO
A: Alpha
and a Comb map. I’m planning on adding some more, like tiling textures to add more definition, and to punch out some more holes in the hair-cards, while also adding many more hair-cards to fill it in a little more.
As for the eye-shader. I am still completely blind on that thing. Not a clue as to how to introduce the iris refraction, which is the main thing to figure out before starting anything else.
Hope that helps, and I hope epic releases some content examples soon, so I can finish these materials!
