Real-Time Hair Cards + Wind Breakdown
I created this hair initially to try out Fibershop but then I wanted to try experimenting with getting a wind shader working inside Unreal Engine 5. I went to Matt with my questions who showed me the whole pipeline of setting up an asset for use with a wind shader and how to add variation to add some realism. Matt and I then decided to write up a breakdown of how to do this as there isn't a ton of information on how to approach wind in Unreal. Whilst I focused on hair card creation, Matt worked on the shader breakdown. Massive shoutout to Matt for all his help and for being super patient with me!
https://www.artstation.com/maitchison
Scruffy by Tomos Hywel Evans
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yb1b89
Wind applied in UE5
Cap making timelapse using XGen Core
Around 42,500 tris (including eyebrows, eyelashes, hair cap and eyebrow cap)
With no flow map, the light renders very flat. With a flow map, we can see more depth in each strand
Preview of the different vertex colour passes and cloth proxy meshes that are layered up to get the final wind result
Colour variations controlled by the shader in Unreal
Alternate short version
Alternate short version
Thank you for reading!