how to render hair without using "Cutout"

I'm trying to accomplish a soft fur effect within this project. Selecting "Fade" within the shader messes up the drawing of the polygons and "Cutout" makes the edges way too hard. Any advice on how to fix the drawing order issue with the shader?

Cutout doesn't have a draw order issue but the edges are choppy and hard


Fade solves the hard edges but isn't rendered correctly.

 

That's a hard problem even on big production, everybody seems to have moved to cut out with special dithering shader, and anti aliasing solution.

 

thanks I'll give that a shot! Any recommendations on what a good dithering shader to use would be?

 

1. find a blue noise texture (there is some in the HDRP sources)
2. Apply the noise in screen space
3. cut out based on distance, alpha +- the source noise value
4. use a post process of your choice that smooth things out.

 

For blue noise images and also information about blue noise I've used this excellent site:
http://momentsingraphics.de/BlueNoise.html

Just in case you haven't bumped into it. They are CC0 license, too.

 

If anyone writes a shader that does this, I'd love to get pinged so I could use it for CC3 hair ...