Game Hair

[simsimma31]

Hi, I am trying to get my head around the best way of modeling hair for game characters.

Now then... I have been following the tutorial on worley labs on the following link http://www.worley.com/Tutorials/StuTut/index.htm

My question is how do I get the final hair created and rendered via sas in the above example on my game character?

Regards

[Dodgy]

Game characters don't use sas.

Hair in games is either done with polygons using clip maps, or special shaders (the latter is rarely used atm, due to computational cost, but with each new generation of cards it comes closer to be usable)

[Red_Oddity]

Depends on what type of hair, fur can be done by stacking polygons with clipmaps (think Shadow of the Colossus), hair is done by using strips of polygons or simple polygon shapes with clip/transparancy and specular mapping (almost all modern games either with or without 'dynamic' / flowing hair)

http://web.archive.org/web/20060820162258/www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20051207/3dwa.htm

[simsimma31]

Thanks for your reply dodgy..

May be I could use sas to create the hair texture of which i could later use as clip maps? is this possible?

[Dodgy]

I would've said place polys in the rough shape of the hair and use the surface baking camera, but that doesn't seem to work. I think you'd be better off and quicker drawing the hair or using photos to generate it anyway.

[kahalany]

There's a nice (& free) polygonal hair modelling tool by d-creation called HairBlade. Check it out at http://d-creation.sakura.ne.jp/plugin_latest.htm

[simsimma31]

Many thanks for the advice above. This hair modeling is really challenging...or maybe I am too much of a perfectionist. Anyone got some good examples to show off?

[Philbert]

Found this thread a bit late. Sadly it seems that HairBlade doesn't work any more. It won't install.

[Philbert]

I was mistaken, it does work you just need the 32 bit LW version.

[Philbert]

Unfortunately LW 32 bit won't run on my main computer right now so I'm stuck doing this on my laptop.

[Elmar Moelzer]

Unfortunately LW 32 bit won't run on my main computer right now so I'm stuck doing this on my laptop.

Why is that?

[Philbert]

I don't know why it just kept crashing when I tried to load it. However after messing around with it, reinstalling, etc, then rebooting, it now works fine.