[FREE] Hair Material

Hi all!

I’m making an anisotropic reflections hair material and I want to share it with the all of you.

This is the first version of the material, I hope that the community help me to improve it and make it better and bigger Hair Material for all.

Version 1 Features:

[X] Solid color
[X] Gradient color
[X] New gradient control (more Artist friendly)
[X] Full Highlights Control (Color, Power, Shift and Strength)
[X] General Shift control (height)
[X] Jitter ammount
[X] Lit mode
[X] Roughness control
[X] PBR Specular Control (Affects all hair, only Highlight 1, Power)
[X] Rim Light (Exponent, Color, Strength)
[X] Glitter control (WIP) (Glitter Texture, Switch for highlights, Power)
[X] Diffuse base texture (colored by Gradient or Solid color)
[X] Highlight 1 Mask Texture
[X] Shift Texture (more real hair, anime style…)

Note: UV’s of the hair model must be vertical (Hair root in the top, and tip in the bottom) for now

If somebody has problems to create the material, ask me in this thread.

Full Material (Right click > Open in a new tab/window for full size image)

Material Function Color Gradient (Right click > Open in a new tab/window for full size image)

Material Function Shift Tangent (Right click > Open in a new tab/window for full size image)

Material Function Strand Spec (Right click > Open in a new tab/window for full size image)

SmoothStep Custom Node

You can download the base textures HERE

Note: Highlight Mask is not included, you have to use a full white image by default.

You can see a Mini Tutorial about How to setup “LightVector” with Material Parameter Collection “MPC_SunDirection” HERE

UPDATE: You can download a sample package HERE

I share this material with all of you with three conditions:

  • This is **FREE **for all, DO NOT SELL IT (you can sell your games, of course, and I hope you will :P)
  • If you improve it or add new features please share it here to help all the community :slight_smile:
  • If you distribute this material, please include a reference to this thread

When I’ll have free time to add some of the new features, maybe I will upload the .uasset files, but this will require some time.
In the meanwhile, let me know if you have any problem creating the material and I will help you :slight_smile:

All 3D models by Mizuko

Old Wip thread (For reference)

English isn’t my first language, so please excuse any mistakes. :slight_smile:

11 Likes

Ohhhhh Thank u for this great tutorial.

¡Gracias amigo! :wink:

You. I like you.

Congrats on the release! I have been working on something visually similar but technically different. Very cool to see!

This looks great! Thanks for sharing it :slight_smile:

Quick tip for all: Make sure you right click on the material graph images above and select Open in a new tab/window to see the full size image!

This is awesome, I was going to build my own, but I would only know how to do it in substance. I am still relatively new to UE4 material editor. This should be really helpful for me :slight_smile:

Thanks all :smiley:

I see your Fur & Fiber Assets, really cool effect :smiley:

By the way, you can share the material by just copying the .uasset files of it and uploading them somewhere.

I’m glad that you like it :slight_smile: and thanks for the quick tip! :smiley:

I have a question, what is in the light direction parameter collection?

As the light calculation is now deferred (and not forward like some other engines) we don’t have a way to determine the light direction from the material anymore (.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Vector/index.html#lightvector). Keeping that in mind we have to provide an artificial light direction vector to the material. In this case, MiDaEm used a material parameter collection to share the information with all materials that need to access it.

You can find more about Material Parameter Collection @ .unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ParameterCollections/index.html

Awesome! thanks for the share! Looks great. Can’t wait to dissect it tonight.

That’s it! :smiley:

Thanks for the help :slight_smile:

Thank you and enjoy! :smiley:

This would be really helpful for us just learning the material nodes. I have only had the to learn a few of the basic ones so far. This is above my complexity since I only get Saturdays and Sundays to play. If not no worries, thanks for this Midaem looks so realistic.

Interesting work, MiDaEm. I just attempted to reverse engineer it and got stuck on the SmoothStep node in the MF_StandSpec material function. It doesn’t show up in search.

If you could share the material asset files, that would be wonderful n.n

+1 Im also stuck on this. I’m pretty sure its a custom node, If you could post the code that would be great :smiley:

Fantastic Work! I can’t wait to get it working properly and thanks for the Share!

UE4 implements a SmoothStep function in Runtime/Core/Public/Math/UnrealMathUtility.h, here is the code:


static float SmoothStep(float A, float B, float X)
	{
		if (X < A)
		{
			return 0.0f;
		}
		else if (X >= B)
		{
			return 1.0f;
		}
		const float InterpFraction = (X - A) / (B - A);
		return InterpFraction * InterpFraction * (3.0f - 2.0f * InterpFraction);
	}

I’m guessing this is what the custom node needs to be: