How do the hairs work?
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I'm trying to rebuild the main toons in UE4 to make new cinematics. I have literally everything working, apart from their hair.
The textures extracted with OpenIV all have intuitive alpha channels. I don't understand how it's supposed to work.
Here's a pic of Mikey-boy. The problem is very apparent around his sideburns.
The peds I reassembled are even worse, with their hair all sitting sideways and stuff.
Can anyone help please?
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So it's starting to look like the Rockstar engine is doing some clever sweeping thing between the inner and outer faces of the wig in-game. Probably part of the hair physics/dynamics system.
This hair problem is the last item on my buglist so I need to move on. I guess I'll have to tweak the wig meshes and do some custom alpha fades at the seams.
I hate hairing. I'm just no good at hairing.
Such is life...
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@Katzenjammer Rage engine is a piece of art in rendering and system resources efficient management and Unreal is a piece of nice graphics but killing system resources with exaggerated number of rendered layers. About GTA V hair shader, not uses a double face, is a sublayers generated from textures with normal tilled textures and anisotropic filtering applied and following normals in the hair mesh. Also, Rage engine uses colors in specular maps to render material types over each color, you can proof this looking all peds specular maps (for hair exists some green colors to assing hair shader). In Unreal could be a parallax layered shader with specular and normal anisotropic filter.
GTA V handles 0 and 255 alpha values in hair textures only, so for Unreal you need to use a transparency shader or a cutout shader with pretty hard antialiasing to look nice and if you not find a parallax layered hair shader, you can edit the hair mesh cloning it and reducing a bit its scale to emulate layered hair like in GTA V.
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Hi @Rarefacer, thanks for your valuable response. I do appreciate that.
I'll spend a day or two trying to emulate the material layers as you suggested. What you say makes a lot of sense, and possably explains the workarounds I needed for some of the glass as well. I haven't attempted any caustics yet, but I'm guessing the same thing applies.
I have been having a bit of trouble extracting some of the specular and normal maps and converting them to a portable image format, so it looks like I cut a corner too soon there. I'll go back and have another stab at it. If I can pull those out then I should be able to work out what goes where. If that fails I'll follow your second suggestion of mesh layering instead.
Many thanks
NB: I know Unreal is a saggy, sweaty, wheezing bloated behemoth of an engine. However, for a student such as m'self UE4 is the only real path I have to explore cinematic animation. Piped with Blender, Max and Motionbuilder of course. If Rockstar fancy giving me a job then I'll be more than happy to play with the elegant engine of Rage.