Dear epic, don’t make me unleash these.
Place the screenshot of the hair material in an unmarked bag in the park by the bench at 2pm.
No police.
I think they’re preparing something better than just a screenshot.
However, it’d still be great if they shared a material sample with us in the mean time.
I think it’s not the actual process of taking a screenshot. It’s more a bureaucratic thing I guess. Someone has to sign off on a thing like this, as most of Epic employees are not allowed to share such data from a project like Paragon.
Edit: On the other end, if they are allowed to show it on a Twitch stream…
Maybe showing it on the twitch stream was a mistake
For the record it would be great to have a new sample file for hair. But on the other hand the hair sample file in the content was revisited and updated with 4.13 because it had obvious issues before then which really made it difficult to use, they fixed a few things in there which for the most part I think is now very much identical to the Paragon hair shader in its basis that they showcased on stream. We have been using this with overall good identical results like the ones they had in the showcase in terms of shading. The obvious issues that are still present were also present in the Paragon stream (and this also depends on the hair type and shape) for instance the back scattering for light has some issues, but these are by no means show stoppers, and i think is part of the shader core issues that they may be facing also, with correct careful lighting it would sell the visual. But like i said these issues were also visible in their showcase. Unless they made a drastic update to it recently, I can say that the content sample pretty much works as advertised. It really all depends on your maps textures (which are very clear of what they are and required to be, the basics) and most of all hair shape. Just follow and study the sample file as the basis and you’ll get the idea for the shader.
Also the screen grabs above are very much identical to the sample file, unless again i’m missing something.
With that said hair in general is a very delicate subject to tackle in real time and to get it looking right, and shader is only 25 -50% of the whole deal, the paragon girl’s character’s hair modeling/shape is what sells it first before the shader steps in to do the rest.
Edit: Someone showed a Blender hair workflow, for the record that is the most basic type of hair you can achieve and you wouldn’t even need the hair shader for it, it simply has a simple anisotropic highlight plus you can add some faked SSS is you want to go further and you’ll have it like that in Unreal. I think this shader is an interesting workflow for faking anisotropic for hair for a more exaggerated effect: [FREE] Hair Material - Asset Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums
Lastly we forget sometimes that what really sells hair shading is not just the texture but most of all the soft edges. You can have the best texture in the world but if those edges are hard as in Alpha hard, then all is lost (unless it’s stylized and intentional), unfortunately we only have the dithering to save the day. However Software like Blender, Max and Maya all have smooth alpha blending in their viewports which is very deceiving and something that we can’t have in Unreal without resorting to Dither to fake it somewhat.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/Showcases/PhotorealisticCharacter/
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/photorealistic-character-sample-released
“Photorealistic characters in UE are easy! You just need a multi-million dollar 3D scanning rig!”
I feel like their time could have been better used making more documentation.
I don’t understand why to criticise this; it’s great they’ve shared this content.
Unreplicable.
Nah, this stuff is good
I’m not the greatest sculptor in the world but I know enough to create enough of model to benefit from these shaders (and the docs)