Hi DamirH…sure!
I did my texture in photoshop using some tricks to have something as close as possible to the exact needed maps.
I painted my strands with some custom brushes (basically small points) with an automatico color variation between black and white: this means that every stroke has the same color but in the end the color ID map seems ok.
Now the problem is to have the root tip gradient: my strand is composed by more layers (each layer contains strokes of about the same lenght) and with a simple photoshop action I create a black/white gradient for the specific layer: for a complete strand I have a buch of gradients of different lenghts stacked.
For depth mask I used the same layers: I’ve painted from the lowest to the highest, so I select pixels for a layer and fill with a color… painting from black to white for each layer mimic the depth of the hair.
Alfa comes for free selecting the pixels and filling with white
A solidify filter bleeds the color and textures are ready.
I know that sound like a quite complicated method but at the moment it seems the best way to have all the needed informations for the material.
So this is an example… please note that in order to have a strong effect I also edited the curves in photoshop and make the alfa channel thicker… the original texture has thinner hairs (that I prefer and I’d like to have on the character):
and these are the channels (clockwise R: roottip G: colorID A: alfa B: depth )
So, I’ve figured out the issue, if you make a material instance of the hair material, there should be a scalar parameter called “Dither”, turn that to 0.
some of your issue is related to your textures. Good rule of thumb is to put your material on the clumbs that came with the content example and test using it. If it looks worse than the default then you are probably doing something wrong. also try using the example rooftop and/or the individual value textures.
Lastly i think the major problem is that there is no self shadowing. hair needs self shadowing to look real.
unless it will be an anisotropic mess.
