First off: I absolutely adore the visuals and usability of the new Groom system and was extremely excited when I first started to mess with it. However there are two blocking issues with the Groom Asset’s rendering that prevent it from being usable for my needs.
##Emissive
Grooms appear to completely ignore all emissive information included in the material and hooked into the emissive slot. When the same material is put onto any typical mesh, the emissive glow is displayed as expected. I don’t know if this is a limitation, a bug or just something that hasn’t been implemented yet, but the ability to have some regions of a groom glow is a must for my needs.
##Opacity Mask
When using the opacity mask blend mode the groom completely ignores the input and doesn’t respond to masking in any way. Again this displays perfectly fine when the same material is dropped onto any other mesh. Being able to mask certain parts of hair or fur via the material is needed for cases where the groom may be covered by other objects such as hats or helmets, being able to mask out portions of the groom via textures using the root UVs and other tricks would be incredibly useful and allow the same groom meshes to be reused in more dynamic contexts where what regions should be visible can change.
##Bug, feature request?
I don’t know if this qualifies as a bug, a feature request or a question but I would love to leverage the incredible groom system in my projects, but I really need these two functionalities to be available for it to completely fill my needs.
I’d love to hear word on if these will ever be accounted for in the groom rendering, or even if anyone has bright ideas about how to work around these two limitations.