Custom fur shader & other news (Patreon)

Adding "real" fur to our characters is something we have wanted to do for a while now, but the options available haven't been great. There are basically two fur shaders in the Unity asset store, and neither one of them support a [for us] crucial feature - directional fur. This is quite surprising, considering most creatures don't have fur standing right up. For example, the hair of a dog is streamlined and goes along its back.

This past time we've been researching how to develop our own custom fur shader supporting directional fur. Apart from developing this custom fur shader, we also had to research and develop tools for the directional fur authoring and export.

Today, we're happy to share the results of our work:

Head

Body

Body without fur authoring (for comparision)

Ultra resolution image

All these are rendered in Unity 5 using our custom fur shader. The fur directions have been hand-authored by Dogson. You cannot currently achieve this effect with any other shader in Unity (at least not available in the asset store).

This shader is quite heavy compared to a normal surface shader. We're still not 100% sure if we're gonna keep it or not, but we're definitely gonna let you guys try it out and have your opinions heard. Hopefully, this shader should be part of the next patron build.

Overall the 0.5 cycle will be mainly focused on polish and improvements in visual fidelity and functionality, but also in other areas. We're spending a lot time paving the way for custom characters by automating more of the workflow. This work won't be immediately visible, and thus not so exciting, but extremely important nonetheless. We're also hoping to revamp the sounds and add ambience to the environments.

We hope you're as excited about these developments as we are. Devoting time to creating a custom fur shader was a big risk for us, since this meant entering unknown territory and chance of success was uncertain. The time invested could easily have been proven to be wasted. Even though we might end up scrapping this, it feels like a success from a research and development point of view (because we got it to work), and we learnt a lot of useful things during this journey.