Personal Progress Log 01 - Learning Hair

So After the first couple team meetings it was decided that I would create two characters for the vertical slice one being the main character of the game Misho and the other being a character which is called Zingo. The first hurdle I saw with these character models was that they would both feature fur which is an element I haven't worked on in the past yet it has been an area I've always wanted to work on as it would allow future production of human characters featuring hair which would be crucial skill to have and to be shown in my portfolio. Unfortunately like a lot of the skills I have learnt since first year in 3D modelling learning this from just one YouTube video or a class isn't an option so I first went to Artstation and searched tags such as fur and hair to see techniques used by industry veterans.

After searching for a while I finally found one artist that had a good example of the production of game ready hair, that artist was Nakshatra Solanki ( Artstation- https://www.artstation.com/naky1000 ). In one of his posts he demonstrates how the fur is produced on a wolf model and then shown with in the Unreal Engine, It is to be noted that the Unity engine graphically is far inferior to the Unreal though if a less graphically demanding use of this technique is used for Misho and Zingo it should in theory work in the Unity Build of the game. I'm trusting this overall process with the artist working for and Indian based Games studio called Little Red Zombies known for the work on games such as Control and Ghost of Tuishima where one of the main areas they worked on being hair and animal fur.

The overall process see's the same usual sculpting of a character building up their anatomy and features. The areas of fur that are sculpted at this stage are to show where the main layers of fur have built up on the creature, this allows for when placing the fur models later down the line its easy to build up heavy fur areas.

In the wolf example the fur is made up of an overall 5 fur clumps which are baked on to low poly sheets and placed accordingly on the model using real world images of wolves as reference. From what I've seen any realistic take on fur that is seen real time in game engines uses this method with games like Last of us and Uncharted using this method as well. Obviously The Unity engine is not as powerful as the Naughty Dog engine but a revised use of this technique I believe will work in Unity.

From this point I tried to find further tips on how to use this method, this included a video from an independent youtuber that details the process of baking the high poly detailed hair to the low poly planes. Other details such as hair shape and performing other techniques was found in a Blender.Today Livestream that came out last year. The final video showed the overall process of a Norwegian indie game studio called Myrkur Games which I used to get an overall understanding of the whole process even though the video doesn't show any details for Unity Engine and Blender.

So Overall the process will consist of several steps that hopefully should work in the Unity engine without a hitch. I firstly create several hair simulation of several different hair clumps (I will use real world animal fur for reference for this step). These clumps are then baked onto low poly sheets (Baking is the process of capture high poly detail on to low poly models through texture channels, examples will be shown later down the line.). I will then place these multiple baked hair poly sheets throughout the character, slowly building up the look of fur that can then be rigged and used in engine.