Hair Designer - Dynamic hair & fur tool

Love you so much!
How about new long hair system happen on twin tail? Wait for it

 

The new version will have better motion system and interraction with colliders.

 

Great to hear that ! and what with skinned character weights on this exported asset, Will it be there or it will just export only mesh without weight

 

The full mesh is exported, it's used for sharing the mesh between all the instances of the hairCut (if you duplicate the character). It's required to save the mesh if you want to create a prefab of your character.

 

Just adding for anyone who ran into the issue I ran into, if you're trying to paint hair onto a model and it's throwing a bunch of warnings, make sure your mesh has read/write enabled or it won't work.

kalagaan - would it be hard to add a user-friendly warning that gets thrown in this case to warn users to enable read/write if it's not turned on? Seems obvious in hindsight but I wasn't aware you could turn read/write off in the first place

 

Of course, I'll add a warning message in the design tab if the mesh is not readable
and the way to fix it

 

Hello, I'd love to know when you'll have the HDRP implementation finished.

 

Shii, I told you a secret, but won't you tell everybody.
Just a moment, mystery's sound said DONE.

 

Is it possible to make the hair shader working in the "book of the dead" demo? Tried out the demo scene and imported some of my other assets with the plugin and it only shows pink/purple textures shells instead of the fur. I guess this has something to do with the demos render pipeline settings. Is there a workaround? Im just curious!

 

Funny you should mention that. I've ported the wind model to 2018.3 including the shaders and scripts. Problem with it is that you need direct changes in the HDRenderPipeline.cs within the com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition package, with the addition of the HDRPAttributeCallback.cs file. This is completely doable when producing custom render pipeline, but the problem comes with you want to upgrade to a newer version of the unity packaged HDRP code.

I'm soon going to work on making as much as that code portable so that you have to edit the package files less. In the mean time, I've done a little bit of work to get "hair" to interact with the wind model. I think it's very doable, but you need to do a few things first. For instance, you need to vertex paint on UV4 in order to use the Hierarchy Pivot wind or procedural wind. However, single pivot wind "can" work without that vertex paint.

Say you have a simple fur coat. What I did as an experiment was to set the fur material to single pivot, and create a flutter map that defines the pivot points for that material (where the white coloring meets the black coloring). I was able to get the fur to flutter around, but it has some problems. You have to set a low wind strength value, and a high wind range value. Otherwise the mesh will freak out and cause graphical glitches. The gold is in the flutter settings, play around with those values to get it just right.

Now, hair (like on a humanoid's head) is a bit trickier. I think if you have short, straight hair, you could use the same method... kinda. But long, curly or braided hair (including pony tails and such) do not work with this basic method at all, or just plain looks bad. The next thing I want to try is actually baking vertex data like they did in BotD trees, I'm just looking for the right application (that isn't maya) to do this in.

So hopefully there will be some more updates on this later.

 

So.... HDRP is implemented? If so I highly recommend the dev to add that to the description of the asset.

 

There's an early beta version of the HDRP shader, but it needs some work
I'm converting all my shaders to ASE nodes.
The fur shader is not finished yet, so I'll push the official version when all the hair layer will work with HDRP

 

Very nice! You got a timeframe for the next relase?

 

Following up on this...any news?

 

January
I'll have a break next week

 

I'm working on an exporter and a hook script for UMA Dynamic Avatar.
I've send a version of HairDesigner to @Jaymi, so I'll send him the exporter script when it will be ready

 

Here the first step :

- I've painted a hairCut on the reference character (UMA Blender file)
- An editor script exports a prefab with the mesh references to the project.
- A script generates the haircut at runtime.



There's still a lot of work

 

Hi, awesome tool!
I use it with MCS + PuppetMaster, works nicely so far.

Q: Is it possible to copy layers from one HairDesigner into another? I would like to create haircuts with a clean model and then use only polished layers for prefabs (share same SkinnedMeshRenderer but in different objects).

 

Thank you,

you can't copy layers between gameObjects yet, I'm working on it for the UMA compatibility, so it will be possible to generate Haircut at runtime from templates files

 

Sounds great, I'll stay tuned, thank you

 

This asset has progressed by leaps and bounds since I last looked at it! Very nice. I don't need a hair modeling tool within Unity perse, but the shaders look great! Is it possible to use the shaders from Hair Designer on imported hair models?

 

Thank you!
You can use the atlas shader on other objects, but some features are linked to some data embedded in the mesh, and others provided by the HairDesigner script (wind, animation...)
The texture generator can also be use to generate textures (diffuse, normal, AO) for other shaders.
If you want to know if it works on a specific model, please send me a fbx, and I'll test it
The fur shader require the HairDesigner script.
The tool will continue to grow up, I'm working on nice new features

 

Hi, show me more new feature. Interesting !!

 

I'll post some info as soon as I'll have nice results
I have to finish some work before releasing new features : better long hair motion & Haircut export for UMA.

 

Hello, I have been using this since about September. Great asset. Today however, I ran into an issue that was either always there or it just started happening. I cannot for the life of me make it go away and was hoping you could point me in the right direction?

I changed some color values, that was all. The hair has been untouched since about October. When I restart Unity this artifact goes away.. but as soon as I hit play.. or do a build it persists.

 

kalagaan I was really happy to see that you are working on UMA integration as this is key for me and what I am waiting on. Any roadmap on when you think it might be ready to start testing? Also are you thinking that the values for color and what not would be changeable at run time?

 

Where is the LWRP friendly version?

 

I think that it should be available next month
You'll be able to use the HairDesigner API, so the shader parameters will available at runtime.

 

the LWRP and HDRP are still in preview and there's a lot of modifications between each version.
I'll continue to work on it after the UMA integration.

 

Here a sample using the Unity HDRP Lit shader :



and the settings :

 

Also waiting on that UMA export b4 I buy, as I'm sure a lot of people are. Keep up the awesome work bruh!

 

Been working with this asset for a couple months now, I like it very much! I'm wondering if you can tell us anything about anything coming up for long hair? Any tutorials or updates? Thanks!

 

I'm working on a new long hair animation & collision system, I'll do a tutorial when this new version will be released.
I've also started to work a new tool for generating strand models.

 

Hi, i´m using 2018.3.6 and i problem with the new prefab workflow i guess : /
I just switched to 2018.3 and now i cant paint on a Mesh if it is a child of another object.
I can move the gameobject to the root and can paint, but if it is a child i cant paint hair meshes on it.
Any suggestions???

 

Thank you for the feedback,
I did some tests with unity 2018.3.6, there's some warning because the unity API for prefabs has changed, but it's still working. I'll add a new version for 2018.3.6 compatible with the new prefab API.
I can't reproduce the bug you described, could you send me a sample scene for testing?
(contact@kalagaan.com)

 

https://twitter.com/Gaxil/status/1084051635037528065

https://twitter.com/Gaxil/status/1103407765635166208

Have you seen this approach @kalagaan?

 

Yes, I've seen it, this is a really nice shader

I've started to work on my own geometry shader, but it's still WIP, there's some issues with the transparency and the shadows. This shader requires a high poly mesh, because each strand is generated on an existing face of the model.
The current version is compatible with the brush system of the fur layer.

I don't know yet when I'll release it.

 

Very nice.

 

afaik LWRP is coming out of preview in the next version. It is considered feature complete and there are no more breaking changes for it.

HDRP will be ready quite far into the future. Towards the end of the year as it seems, or even later. Their progress is not synchronized.

 

Just bought this asset for a project using HDRP. Now I'm finding out it doesn't work with HDRP. When can we expect an update?

 

I'm finishing the UMA integration for the next update, I'll continue my work on the HDRP conversion after the release.
You can try to use the HDRP lit shader with the textures generated by the tool.

 

Is there a demo or tutorial video using a daz3d genesis model with your product?

 

It works with Daz3D models, but I don't have a specific demo or tutorial.

 

UMA support coming soon

 

YEa! This looks good, keep it up! Can't wait to see what the final UMA compatible hair looks like!

 

HairDesigner 1.6.2 has been submitted to the assetstore,
it should be available soon

It includes :
- 'Runtime layers' : each layer can be exported as a prefab and can be loaded at runtime.
- UMA compatibility (beta) : the runtime layer can be loaded on UMA characters (Dynamic Avatar)

Here the new workflow for using HairDesigner with haircut variations :
Design
- Create a design scene for the character
- Create layers
- Export runtime layer
Runtime
- Load only the needed layers on the final character

 

Hi, new version got better performance on long hair?
Like this ...

 

Sorry, not yet,
I still need to fix some bugs on the motion system.
This should be available in the next release

 

Will the work be done 100% within UMA?

 

Here the workflow :
Design :
-Create a scene with the UMA character Male_unified (or female),
- Add the HairDesigner component
- Create the hair layers
- Export the Hair layers to the project

Runtime :
- Add a HairDesignerUMALoader component to the dynamic avatar
- Set the references of the hair layer to load.