Hey All,
Essentially, making the hair in blender inst’ so bad overall, but I’m having a rather important issue.
When I go and extrude the generated hair, they obviously all extrude in the same direction - this causes them to be nearly invisible when you look from the side of the character.
Does anyone have any quick ideas on how to get some random x/y/z rotation on the extruded hair? or maybe a better approach? (custom meshes? I’m starting a test on that so I can control the UV anyway.)
Just a quick update. It’s not perfect by any means, but the best process so far:
Create the hair mesh by applying the modifer.
select the mesh and go into edit mode. select vertex to be able to select stuff.
select half the hair, and click ctrl+ until the full strands are selected.
Extrude X, Extrude Y (.0005 works for me)
Click ctrl+ 2 times to select all the hair you just extruded.
Ctrl I to invert selecting and work the other side.
The result is more geometry then you want really, but the hair is visible from nearly every angle
Anyway, recalculate normals, wait half an hour for a smart uv unwrap and that’s that. it’s not ideal at all (i’d like to control the exact UV of every strand by having it identical instead of unwrapping).
still, decent looking hair for ~159,000 tris is not bad.
Obviously this doesn’t help with curly or many other types where the extrude process will just fail or create a mess.
Since I never post actual work, figured I’d break that by sharing the progress on this.
It’s by no means what I want the final thing to be like, but it’s pretty close.
in pie screenshots are Medium settings
Possibly the most horrible shot, you can really notice the mask fading.
Here you can somewhat notice the hair different normal. beard too. Guess I have to re-consider the extrude process one more time.
Not sure I understand it exactly, but the issue wasn’t the normals per-se, but the tangent value for the hair material. Guess I’ll need some sort of flow map.
coming in 4.24
**Hair and Fur Rendering and Simulation (Experimental). **We have experimental support for hair rendering and simulation. In 4.24, you’ll be able to import your Alembic (.abc) groom from an external DCC application, create and setup your hair using the Groom component in UE4, Author and Edit your Material in UE4, and use Niagara to set up hair physics with some adjustable settings.
I wonder if that will help any at all with this. surely for Fur, but I’m about a month away from even worrying about that 
Either way, for now at least, I think I’ll transition to an LOD of hair cards. just to have something that’s not quite so prone to issues… thanks or the update though 
Between the skysphere/athmosphere changes, the supposed landscape changes, and this, it seems 4.24 is finally bringing some valuable time saving stuff to everyone.
who knows, maybe I can get to run my own game at 120fps on a 4k screen…
