I just got UE4 and will be using it not only for video games, but for movies as well. The one thing I haven’t seen yet in any demos or videos is hair rendering, especially long hair. With the latest Unreal technology is this possible? Does anyone know of any videos or demos that demonstrate a technique that looks good?
There’s no specific tool for that, right now you have to do it the way you’d do any other hair, with textured planes. There’s some different ways you can add some physics to it though it’s not going to be like real hair simulations.
Epic is working on a solution though and there’s a guy in the WIP section that’s done some work so I’m sure we’ll get something at some point.
Yeah, I did find it listed in the Roadmap as Hair/Fur so it seems it’s being considered. I’m not sure I understand the roadmap thing though. It has items in there with months listed and a voting system. Are these all actually items being developed or just items suggested by the community and then voted on? It seems strange that they haven’t implemented hair yet since NVIDIA has realtime hair demos such as the following:
And it’s just using PhysX. So, hopefully we’ll get this in the engine at some point. It would be truly amazing.
I think the Nvidia stuff only works on Nvidia hardware, and Epic will only add features that are supported by all the GPU brands.
The roadmap has some things that they are actively working on, if there’s a month timeframe listed there, then they are working on it and that’s when they plan to have it done. But there’s also wishlist things that people have suggested that don’t have a timeframe and may never be done.
Thanks. I just found that there are explanations for this on the roadmap itself, but I just didn’t see it.
As far as only working on NVIDIA, I see that AMD has an equivalent with TressFX hair.
I have been working on TressFX port for a while now:
It still has a lot of work to do, but I am considering opening the development up to the public, or at least more people to try push it along faster.
That looks really good. Congratulations on making progress on a solution. I don’t need hair just at this moment though and am really hoping the hair/fur shader on the roadmap is going to be what I need.