poll 4 wip5 - final model (Patreon)

- This has certainly been an experience but, yeah ... done ... the model at least.

- I'm considering this as the final presentation shots/look of the asset, most likely, however I may have mentioned something about screw-ups in the previous post, as I recall :P. Well it turns out I screwed up with the textures too, I forgot to smooth the high-poly hairs so the resulting baked textures are blocky because of it. There's also no anti-aliasing, so the textures need rebaking. I might also redo these images or I might not as these are not affected as much by it.

- All individual hair cards have been hand placed and modeled. Nothing has been randomly generated or automated (it's why it took so long). I started to feel burnout by the end due to the repetitive nature of the modeling process. The front is not as detailed as the back because of it, as you can probably tell by hair card density. I definitely feel that the back is the highlight of this asset, both in looks and detail.

- Model polycount is sitting at a hefty 50 thousand triangles. This is ... kinda heavy, not completely insane or extreme though (For comparison, I believe the hair I'm using for my character in FO4 is around 5-7k so this is 10 times that). It's definitely meant for the hero/player character and not some random NPC, you probably wouldn't want polycounts like this for all the hairs in the game. You'd be hard pressed to find a hair model at this fidelity even in most AAA games, so I'd say it's worth it, at the end of the day.

- Aside from the mentioned fixes to the textures, all that's left is Fallout 4 conversion/importing. Might put it in Skyrim too, not guaranteed to happen though.

- As a note on that, I don't actually know what to expect when it comes to it's look in Bethesda's engine, however I can definitely say that it's not going to look nearly as good as this. If there's one thing that rings true in 3D (in all mediums not just games) from my experience, is that regardless of model/texture quality, lighting and shaders are king, and Bethesda's are ... yeah.

- Overall, I'm expecting a much flatter result in FO4, due to lack of shadowing and worse hair shader. There are 2 tricks I'd like to try to simulate shadowing, which should work, though I can't be sure, as I've never tried it on hair, so it's a matter of experimentation. As I mentioned back in the poll, I never really built this with FO4 in mind, I focused on future-proofing. This asset will only look better when ported to other, better engines, as proved by these screenshots.

- Regardless of that, I hope you like the end result that you now see. I definitely enjoyed making this for the most part and would definitely be interested in making more hairstyles in the future. I've made quite a bit of mistakes when building this, so there's A LOT of room for me to grow and improve when it comes to making hair. If you've got specific suggestions for what those hairstyles might be, you can always drop those in the discord suggestion channel and I'd consider those for future projects :)