Conversation about hair (Patreon)

Hey everyone, I hope you are enjoying the latest build.

Its been a while since I posted, but fear not, Sir Shrinkums was hard at work.

I been spending the last week working out top candidates to optimize Femmegeddon, and on the top of that list is Hair.

I was trying out UE4 new hair technology (Groom) but found it has a lot of issues:

1. Its super performant heavy

2. Cant scale the hair well, no scaling, no giantess!

3. Scaling far away produces weird translucency issues that make the giantess look bald. In other words, since Unreal hasn't designed scale in mind, the hair will always look terrible.

4.  At maximum size, the hair sim just breaks (also scale related)

5. requires near clipping plane to be large to hide artifacts in hair. (This makes it hard to get close ups as giantess, and looks really ugly)

So with that said, I've decided to move to the traditional version of hair simulation for games, using hair cards.

The best thing about these is that they scale well and are not as heavy on performance (as long as they are polygon meshes and not strand polygon)

The hair in the image above is an example of the new hair I am developing.

As for the hair styles that exist in the game, I will have to make decisions on which hair I can simulate vs not simulate, and for those hair styles that are unfortunately not poly mesh hairs but must absolutely be simulated (long hair for example). then I will have to scour the internet.

The good news is Ive done my research and imported good candidates for replacements, here is a list of the current state of the hairs I am working on:

Note: (Good) for good state, (Bad) for needs work...

1. Ciri hair : (Good)

- Strand hair

- Can be simulated  

(yes, the demo hair I used thats similar to Ciri from the witcher is making a comeback!)

2. Shoulder length hair: (Good)

- Strand hair

- cannot be simulated

- replacement polymesh version imported!

3. Edgy hair (Violet's hair): (Good)

- Strand hair

- Does not need to be simulated

4. Updo hair (Kim's hair): (Good)

- Polymesh

- Does not need to be simulated

4. Updo hair with Bangs (similar to Kim's hair): (Good)

- Polymesh

- can simulate

5. Long hair (Good)

- Strand hair

- cannot simulate

- replacement polymesh version imported!

6. Sekhmet hair (Bad)

- Stand hair

- Must be simulated

- Replacement needs to be found

7. Pixie cut: (Good)

- Polymesh hair

- can be simulated

There is more hair, but I rather surprise you all next build ;)

Looking forward to the next build <3