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    Can you please justify the use of this method?

    slapin
    posted to: Finish Grooming Layer 1 (Timelapse)

    Can you please justify the use of this method? To me it seems much more complicated than direct geometry modeling also it is much harder to control and get acceptable results with. Same goes for curves method. I do not understand why people find it simple as curves are to hard to control and make look right. Also the resulting mesh density after conversion is excessively high. Also the speed of tweaking  is much slower than with mesh editing, while I spend a week modelling a hair with polygons, with curves I can't complete in month because of complexity explosion, so I have to delete everything and start from scratch many times.

    Reply
    • Kent Trammell replied

      Sure, I'll do my best to justify.

      1. Complex hair card systems are industry-standard in modern video games.  The reason being that hair cards are a much closer approximation of real hair (meaning 100,000 individual hair strands). Currently rendering so many individual strands is too complex for video game technology (though this will not be the case forever) and thus hair cards are more efficient for rendering while also being far more realistic than a solid hair model. Here's a few examples of complex hair card systems:
        1. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/aqKn8
        2. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6aa5gV
        3. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/n2zw9

      2. Solid hair models are not realistic. While this was method was common in early 3D video games (N64, Playstation), it's rarely used anymore unless the style of the game warrants the particular look or the game is designed to run on a mobile phone. Whenever the method is used, realism is not the result since real hair is not a solid mass.


      In short, if the goal is realistic hair for video games / real time application then hair cards is the most effective approach. Even though it's not an easy or fast workflow, it produces a far more realistic result than modeling a solid mass of hair.

      I hope this explanation helps!

    • Juan Valbuena(valbuenajotace) replied

      Hi, I'm not an expert like Kent, but I could add something else to the answer.

      Geometry modeling is not realistic and controlling your model in complex situations is much harder.

      This way it’s easier to work, especially if you are creating AAA modeling because curves are easier to deform and at the end you will have just a few curves.

      Making hair with particles in Blender is a mess and controlling the flow it’s very difficult, and creating difficult patterns like those showed on the links are a horror show.

      Also, if you are sculpting and do not want to retopology your model or your model is very dense in poly counts, having your hair as an alpha gives you more control, because the particle systems is already baked in the alpha images, so your computer don't slow down.

      This technique works very well and to me was a game changer, just think it in this way, you could create organic stuff using box modeling or even hard surface modeling, but it won't be give you a better result than sculpting… so that means that sculpting it's easier than the other technique? Hell no! But it’s more powerful and has more tools and possibilities to create organic stuffs

      Regards.