[XFUR 3 OUT NOW] XFur Studio 2 - The most advanced fur for unity, in all platforms and all pipelines

We are very happy to announce that XFur Studio™ 3 has just been released, as has XFur Studio™ Core. These two new tools bring all the power and performance of our top rated fur simulation suite to the latest Unity releases in either a fully featured or budget friendly manner.

Users who bought XFur Studio 2 - Ultimate Edition after March 1st, 2023 will be entitled to a free upgrade to the Personal Edition of XFur Studio 3.

Users who bought XFur Studio 2 - URP Edition after May 30, 2023 will also be entitled to a free upgrade to the Personal Edition.

Users who bought either edition before the given dates, will be entitled to a 50% discount if they upgrade before July 31. Starting on August 1st, the discount will be of 30% only, as a benefit for early adopters.

XFur Studio™ Core is a more streamlined version of our fur solution. It offers support for both Built-in and URP, it includes the full XFur Designer suite (used to style the fur within the Unity Editor) as well as access to the XFur Studio API to perform changes to the fur at runtime. It does not support HDRP, Curly fur, Emissive Fur, Basic Shells (for low end mobile) nor any of the advanced modules (Decals, LOD, Physics, Weather FX, Randomization).

It is also a far more affordable option for smaller projects, with a price of 50 USD. Users of XFur Studio 2 (either the URP or the Ultimate Edition) are entitled to a 30% discount if they choose to upgrade to this more limited edition, meaning their final price will be 35 USD. This upgrade price does not have any time limits.

Users of the Team Edition can upgrade to the corresponding Team Edition of XFur Studio 3 with a 50% discount. Again, this upgrade does not have any time limits.

Links to the assets are here:

XFur Studio - Core Edition
XFur Studio 3 - Personal Edition
XFur Studio 3 - Team Edition


As such, XFur Studio 2 is now deprecated from the Asset Store and will be receiving technical support until October 1st. You are heavily encouraged to upgrade to the latest version, especially if you are using Unity 2021 or newer.


ORIGINAL POST:


Version 2.7.0 now available !

We are proud to present to you our most recent and biggest tool to date, XFur Studio 2!

​

XFur Studio 2 is the ultimate fur rendering system for Unity. The next evolution of 2018's Unity Awards nominated XFur Studio, the brand new XFur Studio 2 has been re-written from the ground up for extreme performance, quality and ease of use. It is the result of over a year of development and carefully listening to the requests and suggestions of our hundreds of customers to learn what would make their use of XFur Studio better and more efficient as well as the integration with their games more complete
.

XFur Studio 2 allows you to add realistic, fully customizable and efficient GPU accelerated fur simulations compatible with all platforms and rendering pipelines* to your game within seconds and in just a few clicks

Features :

- Advanced fur rendering for Forward and Deferred (in the built-in pipeline)
- Full lighting and shadows support on a per-instance and per-material basis
- Unparalleled performance and quality on all platforms
- Highly rated customer support, full documentation and extensive video tutorials
- Compatible with VR and mobile
- Design tools included to edit, paint, shave and groom the fur all within the Unity editor
- Highly scalable, from low detail fur for mobile games to extremely high resolution for close ups and cinematics
- Dynamic LOD management
- Post Process support *
- Compatible with HDRP and Universal RP
- GPU accelerated fur physics simulation on all platforms, even mobile
- Snow coverage / melting simulation
- Other visual FX such as rain and blood are also supported
- Fur can be groomed in any direction within the Unity Editor through our tools or at runtime
- Fur painting, editing, shaving and grooming supported at runtime through an easy to use API
- Basic fur editing at runtime can be done through 3D brushes, with no coding required.
- Source code included

Notices :

This is a new release and as such, new features and several improvements are to be expected in the upcoming months

Post Process effects that depend on motion vectors (TAA, advanced Motion blur) are not supported. FXAA is the recommended anti-aliasing method

HDRP and Universal RP variants are slightly more demanding than the Built in version due to the internal architecture and limitations of SRP technology

Alpha / Beta versions and features of Unity are not supported. The use of LTS versions of Unity is highly recommended

Characters and models using XFur Studio 1.x or XFur Mobile require additional work and manual setups in order to upgrade to XFur Studio 2. Due to the many internal differences between both versions an automatic upgrade is not possible

​

Additional information :


The tool is available in two editions : Ultimate Edition (for individuals) at a $125 USD price and a Team Edition (for larger teams / companies) starting at $1250 USD

Users who bought XFur Mobile - Standard Edition licenses after August 7, 2020 may be eligible for a free upgrade to XFur Studio 2. Please contact us to our support email for assistance.

All XFur Studio 1.x users who bought the asset after August 7, 2020 will be provided with the upgrade at no cost automatically, simply by going to the Asset's page on the Asset store.

New features and improvements will be released periodically for this tool, guaranteeing that it only gets more efficient and flexible as time goes by.

To give a big thank you to all our returning customers, the users of the original XFur Studio 1.x and XFur Mobile, we are giving them a 30% discount when upgrading to XFur Studio 2.

We hope that XFur Studio 2 becomes a great addition to our projects and games and that with this new release it helps you make your creativity shine even more. We can't wait to see what you will create with XFur Studio 2

Have an amazing week !
Irreverent Software

 

Looks incredible! But one question:

Post Process effects that depend on motion vectors (TAA, advanced Motion blur) are not supported. FXAA is the recommended anti-aliasing method

We use TAA so what does this mean? Just that it won’t affect the fur, or will there be visual issues?

 

The issues may be similar to XFur Studio 1.x (some ghosting) due to TAA not working nicely with very small details moving fast from frame to frame. This effect may be reduced if you adjust the values of the TAA filter (if you had no problems with XFur Studio 1.x + TAA you should see more or less the same results with XFur Studio 2 + TAA )

EDIT : For added clarity, the fur shaders from XFur do not interact with TAA and TAA itself produces slight ghosting with fine details that move fast when they are not made by actual geometry. This effect is not too noticeable and is exactly the same kind of effect that existed in XFur Mobile / XFur Studio 1.x.

If you had no problem with TAA + XFur 1.x / Mobile then you won't have problems with TAA and XFur 2

We hope this helps !

 

Great — we’ve had no problems with v1.

 

I can't believe it's still the shell method
But I need curly hair, you should look into truchet style (seek them on shadertoy), that might work with extreme layering

 

Hi there,

We are indeed researching extensions to our new techniques not only for curly fur but also for other complex "shapes" for the fur strands and, thanks to the very unique way in which XFur Studio 2 operates, to add a lot of new effects and customization capabilities at a minimal performance impact.

There are a lot of, let's say, "highly experimental" features within our private branches of XFur Studio 2 which will become available as we improve them and get them up to at least a beta stage. Right now the biggest hurdle is our intent to ensure all features are available in all 3 pipelines at the same time which presents a unique set of issues, but we are making progress.

The highly modular way in which XFur Studio 2 works will allow us to easily release these features and let each user decide by themselves if they want to try them or not during their beta stage and, if they are not stable enough for their needs, disable them again without any risks.

Thanks for the suggestion about truchet patterns and style, we will certainly look into it. XFur Studio 2 is in good part, after all, the result of more than a year of development and constant re-writes and improvements in order to try to include (or make possible) a lot of the suggestions and requests made by our users over the past 2 years and a half

And indeed, it is shell based fur. Geometry shaders do not play nicely with the new SRPs yet and most low to mid end smartphones do not support them at any usable level, so shell shaders are still the most flexible and powerful method to render fur with tons of effects and customization possibilities in every platform and pipeline and ensure that everything, from the most basic fur to the GPU physics and snow simulations can run on any console, PC and on most modern mobile devices

 

I was wondering how it can handle teh insane fillrate of the shell method, but then I figure out that generating from tip to root instead of the inverse can take care of that by early rejection, so that's how the technique came back from the fillrate death, impressive

 

XFur Studio 2 is a constantly improving tool and as such we are currently developing what will be its first minor update. While there have been no bug reports nor functionality errors to fix so far, there are a few features that didn't make the cut before the release.

In the upcoming 2.0.1 patch you can expect a few small features added to XFur Studio 2 :

• [Stable] Per-material light probe toggle settings. Light probes blending can be either enabled or disabled
• [Beta] Single sided or double sided fur.
• [Stable] Improved FX look for Basic Shells shaders
• [Beta] New fur parameters

This small patch should be available next week

EDIT : Single and double sided fur has been upgraded to Beta state since our early tests work well on all rendering pipelines

 

A small patch targeting Unity 2018.4.26 to solve some bugs and metadata corrupted during the upload has been sent for approval. It should be available for download within the next 48 hours.

These bugs do not exist in newer Unity versions, so we encourage you to upgrade your projects to the latest LTS release, meaning Unity 2019.4

Have a great day!

 

Design tool not shown at runtime, tested with unity 2018.4.26 and 2019.4.9
https://ibb.co/vLmJLp1
https://ibb.co/x2sJvYp

 

Please send any support requests to our support email with your invoice number, so we can solve any issues faster.

Also, the designer interface only appears if you have a character with fur in the scene before pressing play. We just tested in 2018.4.26 and designer works without issues as long as a well setup character/model is present, as is intended.

In short, if you don't have any model present (like in your screenshots) there's nothing to show.

We hope this helps!

 

The patch fixing all known errors when using XFur Studio 2 in Unity 2018.4.26 has been approved on the asset store (much faster than expected!) so it should be available for download already.

This should allow you to open XFur Designer without issues. Just please keep in mind that for the UI to appear you need to have a model in place, with fur, ready to be edited. If needed, you can copy one of the spheres from the demo scene to Designer to edit it, placing it at 0,0,0 in the designer scene.

Please read the documentation for more information.

Have a great day!

 

Thanks, the fur editor works fine, although I have some questions.
in the tutorial you can see how can change the size of the fur in fur properties, but it does not work properly.
the fur is not updated with xf shells
https://ibb.co/vJ0c0h1
the fur is updated with basic shells
https://ibb.co/L1ChTLx

 

Hi there,
I do not know what you mean with adjusting the size of the fur since there is no "Fur Size" parameter. Furthermore, the pictures you share do not show fur being resized. Please explain your problem in more detail and please ask for support through our support email as we told you before, as that allows us to provide better assistance in a more efficient manner.

We hope this helps

 

Please ensure that you have open and are currently viewing the SCENE VIEW. If you only open the Game View the changes you make to the fur will not be applied until you open the SCENE VIEW again. This is once again by design, since the in-editor updates can only happen when the object is visible in the scene view, due to the Game Camera not calling the update functions when the Unity Editor is not in Play Mode.

We recommend you to follow the tutorials step by step and trying to mimic the workflow as much as possible in order to familiarize yourself with the workflow of XFur Studio 2.

Again, to be more clear : in order to visualize changes in real-time while in edit mode the Scene View has to be visible, otherwise the Unity Editor will not call the update functions of XFur Studio 2 as intended.

We hope this helps!

EDIT : After careful testing in Unity 2018.4.26 with several models, every single fur parameter and property is working as expected with both XFShells and Basic Shells modes.

XFur Studio 2 - Working in Unity 2018.4.26 :






and even with changes to the pose of the character :




Please if you have any further issues contact us to our support email with additional, precise information and screenshots of the settings you are using and the parameters you are trying to modify as well as with your invoice / proof of purchase in order to provide you with better assistance.

We hope this helps!

 

I just sent an email about the cause of the problem, thanks for your support

 

There is a slight issue that has come to our attention. While we are considering a general built-in fix for this, the best solution would be for users themselves to address it in a per-project basis, so a small section in the documentation will be added about this particular situation to help users solve it. The issue is as follows :

Some third party plugins, especially those involving inverse kinematics and animation work on the LateUpdate callback but with a modified script order execution forcing them to execute AFTER all other scripts. What this means in practical terms is that XFur Studio 2 when working in XFShells mode renders the fur and THEN the third party plugin moves the bones, making the fur appear as if it is floating.

The solution? Always ensure that XFur Studio Instance is executed after all the other scripts related to animation or bone manipulation in the Script Execution Order settings of your project.

Again, a small built-in workaround will be included with the next update but to ensure that everything works as expected it is still better to ensure that XFur Studio Instance is the last script in the Script Execution Order list after any and all IK / animation scripts from third party plugins.

Also, please remember to attach your invoice / proof of purchase when you ask for support otherwise we will not be able to provide you with any assistance.

We hope this will help some of our users if they experience this issue.

Have a great weekend !

 

XFur Studio 2, update 2.0.1 has been sent for approval and should be available next week!

This is the changelog for this version :

Fixes and improvements :

• FX rendering for Basic Shells now matches 1 to 1 the FX rendering of XFShells
• Automatic fix for script execution order issues. May still need manual setups, but it should prevent most incompatibility issues with third party assets using custom script execution order setups.
• Adjusted rain direction vector
• Fixed incorrect setting in URP demo

New Features :

• Per material double sided fur settings (XFShells only). Select your database asset in order for it to auto-generate the double sided variants of XFur materials, then press Ctrl + S to force Unity to show the new assets.
• Per material light probe settings (XFShells only)
• Wind direction and strength now have adjustable influence over the rain and snow directions
• XFur Wind Zone component has a new, easier to use UI
• Exposed Fur Smoothness parameter on all fur materials

We hope these will be some useful additions for the very first update of XFur Studio 2 !

 

Version 2.0.1 is now available !

Changelog :

Fixes and improvements :

• FX rendering for Basic Shells now matches 1 to 1 the FX rendering of XFShells
• Automatic fix for script execution order issues. May still need manual setups, but it should prevent most incompatibility issues with third party assets using custom script execution order setups.
• Adjusted rain direction vector
• Fixed incorrect setting in URP demo

New Features :

• Per material double sided fur settings (XFShells only). Select your database asset in order for it to auto-generate the double sided variants of XFur materials, then press Ctrl + S to force Unity to show the new assets.
• Per material light probe settings (XFShells only)
• Wind direction and strength now have adjustable influence over the rain and snow directions
• XFur Wind Zone component has a new, easier to use UI
• Exposed Fur Smoothness parameter on all fur materials

 

A small patch will be sent to the store to fix a small issue with the fur not updating when the scale of a mesh is changed. This update will become available very soon, probably as soon as tomorrow.

 

The patch for v.2.0.2 is ready !

- Improvements

• Changing the scale of a mesh immediately updates the fur accordingly

Have a great week!

 

We have released a short video demonstration of the kind of control you can have in XFur Studio 2 when grooming the fur of a character:

​

Grooming works on animated characters as well as on standard meshes, it can be done inside of the XFur Designer editor included with the tool, through the API at runtime or using the Painter Object if you do not want to (or do not have enough experience to) do your runtime fur editing through code.

 

We are doing some (right now very early) experiments for curly / messy fur types. Despite being early experiments the results so far are quite promising







The "curling" process is entirely shader driven and can be configured within the XFur Studio Instance UI. This feature will be released in beta state sometime in the near future, but no specific ETA is available right now since we want to make sure it is as usable and flexible as possible before making it public.

Remember that XFur Studio 2 has been invited to the extension of the Reboot 2020 sale, and you can get it with a 50% off but only until September 30!

Have a great weekend, everyone !

 

A small patch with some fixes and small improvements will be available within the next few days (we expect it to be available before Friday), including :

• Fixes for the Universal RP demo
• Updated documentation for additional clarity on some topics
• Minor improvements to XFur Studio Designer UI
• Minor improvements to XFur Studio Instance UI
• New zooming mode for XFur Studio Designer using the "+" and "-" keys on the keypad

If you need the fix for the Universal RP demo please contact us to our support email with your invoice / proof of purchase.


The Curly update will be available later, hopefully around mid October though we are still polishing some details and preparing the XFur Studio Instance UI and internal resources to easily go in and out of Beta mode so that, from now on, users who want to test the newest XFur Studio 2 features that may still be in development can do so safely while ensuring that they can go back to the Stable feature set without losing any important settings.

It goes without saying, but making a backup is still highly recommended if you plan to use any beta features from future XFur Studio 2 releases!

Have a great week!

 

Version 2.0.5 ( minor patch ) is now available ! :

• Fixes for the Universal RP demo

• Updated documentation for additional clarity on some topics

• Minor improvements to XFur Studio Designer UI

• Minor improvements to XFur Studio Instance UI

• New zooming mode for XFur Studio Designer using the "+" and "-" keys on the keypad

Again, the "Curly" update will be available later, most likely in October along some other new features and the corresponding documentation / tutorials.

And also we want to remind you that the Reboot sale ends on September 30 so these are the last days to get XFur Studio 2 with a 50% off !

Have a great week!

 

A small patch will be released before the end of the week to ensure that scaling of models (especially skinned meshes) behaves in a more predictable way. A new "Auto Adjust Parameters for Scale" toggle will also be included.

There is also another special experiment we are currently running that will definitely interest mobile developers, which we will be showing either tomorrow or on Friday

Have a great week !

 

The scaling patch will be sent to the store later today to be approved around Friday.

Also, as promised yesterday, here is the result of some tests we have been doing regarding mobile development. We have tested and can now confirm that XFur Studio 2 is compatible with ARFoundation apps !

​

And with a quite smooth performance, even under the stress of several characters on screen

This test was rendered in a Redmi Note 8. The GIF does not reflect the full quality of the app since the recording is limited to a 1280x720 resolution.

Have a great day!

 

After the first month since the release of XFur Studio 2 we have a considerably large amount of new users trying XFur Studio products for the first time.

First of all : welcome, we are very glad you have chosen our tool for your projects!

However, with such a large amount of brand new users of all experience levels we believe that some additional learning materials may be necessary. Because of this, during the months of October and November we will be uploading new tutorials and updating our documentation to make it more friendly as well as to provide additional examples, more detailed guides and other learning materials that may be helpful.

We plan to have the first updates to our learning materials available next week. We hope it will be very helpful to all of you, whether you are a new or an experienced XFur Studio / XFur Mobile user, and that with these materials you can take full advantage of everything that XFur Studio 2 offers as well as the brand new features (for which we are very excited ! ) coming in the next few months.

Have a great weekend everyone !

 

Version 2.0.6 of XFur Studio 2 is now available :

• Improvements to mesh scaling when using Skinned Meshes
• Auto-scale adjustment for the fur length (this can be turned off in meshes that do not require it to revert back to pre-2.0.6 behavior

 

Version 2.0.7 will be available near the end of this week with even more improvements and new content :

Fixes and improvements :

• Highly improved wind simulation
• Improved auto-scale behavior
• General QoL fixes for XFur Studio Designer
• Improved tiling for procedurally generated fur strands

New :

• New samples / tutorials
• New simple 3D model to showcase fur and, later this month, newer features
• New fur strands sampling method to reduce visible tiling
• New fur strand parameters to control per-pass size variation
• Procedurally generated fur strand maps can now be exported as .png textures for easy editing in external software such as Photoshop / GIMP.

 

Version 2.0.7 is now available with the following changes :

Fixes and improvements :

• Highly improved wind simulation
• Improved auto-scale behavior
• General QoL fixes for XFur Studio Designer
• Improved tiling for procedurally generated fur strands

New :

• New samples / tutorials
• New simple 3D model to showcase fur and, later this month, newer features
• New fur strands sampling method to reduce visible tiling
• New fur strand parameters to control per-pass size variation
• Procedurally generated fur strand maps can now be exported as .png textures for easy editing in external software such as Photoshop / GIMP.

 

We are currently working in the major update 2.1.x for XFur Studio 2, which will contain several new features and improvements and is being referred to, internally, as the "CURLY" update

Fixes and improvements ;

• Improved Rim color mixing to allow for a wider variety of effects
• Improved fur strand seamless repetition
• Improved texture projection to reduce visible tiling has been ported to HDRP and URP
• Improved wind simulation has been ported to HDRP and URP
• Improved fur shadowing and shadows in HDRP and URP

New features :

• Fur strands now have more variation to produce more natural looking fur
• Fur coloration modifier of each fur strand pass can now be manually adjusted
• Fur rim color can now be boosted manually for better results
• Fur strands can be manually curled in both X and Y axes to produce curly / messy fur
• Custom, hand made fur strands textures for curly fur types

We are also considering adding a new 16 samples Basic Shells variant to allow for a little extra quality (with some additional draw calls) but this will most likely come in a later update.

Curly fur in Universal RP :




Curly fur in Standard RP :



Curly fur interacting with wind :

​

Have a great weekend, everyone !

 

Version 2.1.0, in other words, the CURLY UPDATE, is now available

New features :

• Fur strands now have more variation to produce more natural looking fur
• Fur coloration modifier of each fur strand pass can now be manually adjusted
• Fur rim color can now be boosted manually for better results
• Fur strands can be manually curled in both X and Y axes to produce curly / messy fur
• Custom, hand made fur strands textures for curly fur types

Fixes and improvements ;

• Improved Rim color mixing to allow for a wider variety of effects
• Improved fur strand seamless repetition
• Improved texture projection to reduce visible tiling has been ported to HDRP and URP
• Improved wind simulation has been ported to HDRP and URP
• Improved fur shadowing and shadows in HDRP and URP

Please remember to read the manual included with the asset (the online version of the manual will be updated this week) as it contains useful information about the use of BETA features within XFur Studio 2 and how to start using the curly fur.

​

Again, as this is a beta feature, it may (and most likely will) change in the next versions as we adjust and improve its workflow to achieve the best possible results and as many variations as possible. Procedurally generated fur strands are going to receive updates soon as well so stay tuned for that

We hope that this update will be very helpful to all your projects !

 

Wow, awesome stuff. Picked this up yesterday, and I'm not doing much but the bare bones basics, and it already looks better than I expected to be able to do!

Thanks so much for the hard work!

I will note that when I get too many enemies on screen my framerate drops considerably ... getting this to look good close up in HDRP means every entity counts. I love your LOD stuff ... but is there any way you can build something in which will take into account how many instances are being rendered on screen and adjusting based on that, as opposed to only in relation to the entity's self, or maybe a better suggestion is a way to scale based off frames per second?

I'm going to have to either do the first idea with OnBecameVisible/Invisible or the second ... this wont be playable otherwise since I have to support the player deciding to run around amassing enemies and being stupid (within reason) . I figure I cant be the only person making a game where the enemies can range from 1 - X, where X is dependent on what the player does, so this may be useful in general if you can build it in.

Thanks!

 

Thank you very much ! We are very glad to hear you like our software

Also, thank you very much for your feedback. While fur is one of the most demanding effects to render in real-time and as such it is very difficult to maintain high framerates with many, many characters at once (especially in HDRP / URP due to some limitations when compared to the Built-in renderer) we are indeed looking at different methods to increase performance and adjust the quality of all instances in a scene dynamically depending on target framerate / max instance counts etc., but there is no specific deadline for this yet as we are working on several features at the same time at the moment.

However, we can hopefully have some more advanced LOD manager in place, at least in beta form, around mid-late November

Thank you again for your feedback and for your kind words!

 

That would be great. There's no immediate rush on my part, just recognizing that this will need to be solved eventually to use it in my game (first person and can run around, so the player can end up having multiple monsters running after him), and I'd rather it be done in a proper non-hacky way by the people who understand what they're doing .

 

With the Curly update now available, we will start working on the November updates to our other modules as well as on adding new features and QoL improvements across the entire XFur Studio 2 workflow (on top of the new learning materials ! ). We are very glad with the great reception this asset is getting and all the feedback received so far, which will be very useful as we continue to improve XFur

There's still a lot of work and coding to do...which seems appropriate with today being 10.24

Have a great weekend, everyone !

​

 

Is there any way to make the fur follow the tessellated model? The fur has some hard angles as it follows the model, whereas just a bit of tessellation on LOD0 would make this look much better.

I'm fine if the proper solution is "just paint the fur on better". Let me know if the intended workflow is a lower poly mesh and getting curves on the fur through painting, or naturally by following the curves of the model. It would definitely be quicker to follow the curves ...

Actually. What I really want is an option in the designer to make the fur follow the curves that the model would have IF it were tessellated. That way the base model could stay the same ... its really only the fur that needs its length to curve gently.

First pass at a wolf, notice the hard angles on the fur. The bit around the face is my fault, that was me with the painter going to fast. The part around the back area though I didnt touch. Not sure the best method to make sure the fur is curved around the whole body by default.

 

Hi there,

The fur is entirely based off the model's surface, vertices and normals. This means that if you need / want softer looking edges on your fur you would need additional geometry in your model as well and that if a low poly model has a hard edge look while in certain poses the fur will have the same hard edged look since, once again, it is based on the source model provided. The basic concept behind this would be that if you have a character's neck made of < 12 polygons (just to say a number) that needs to be bent it will probably have some very hard edges and it will not look like a uniform, smooth curve. Once you add fur, the fur will be working with those same <12 polygons so there is no possible way of making the curves in the fur look any smoother than the base model without adding more polygons either to the model itself on your 3D modelling app or through shader based tessellation.

Having actual tessellation on the fur shader is not currently supported since tessellation is not yet officially supported in stable shader graph releases. Once tessellation is fully supported in a stable Shader Graph release we will consider adding it to the shader to allow for a better look on low poly characters without modifying the base mesh.

We are aware that some tools (such as Amplify's Shader Editor) support tessellation in HDRP but ShaderGraph is the only official, Unity supported shader creation method for HDRP and URP and the only one with guaranteed compatibility across newer SRP releases and as such it is the only shader creation tool we can use in order to guarantee our tool will also continue working across SRP releases without depending on any third parties.

Tessellation on fur may arrive earlier to the Built-in pipeline since tessellation is much better supported there.

For reference, our Holly model (the little fox used in our promotional videos) has a little over 6k polygons in total to ensure that every part of the model is smooth and rounded and thus that the fur looks just as round.

Fur length and grooming are calculated on a vertex basis which means that the amount of control you have over their appearance and the precision of these adjustments depends entirely in the amount of vertices of your character. If you wanted to shave a 256 tris sphere to look like a much rounder 1024 tris one this might be possible but it would need to be done by hand and with quite a bit of effort and once again, the results would be limited since the precision of the length variations would be tied to the vertex count.

In most cases, simply making a version of the model with a higher polygon count might be easier.

In short :

• Fur will be generated and look as smooth and rounded as the base mesh. If rounder / smoother results are needed, a rounder / higher resolution mesh is needed as well.
• This could be solved through shader based tessellation but since there is no official support for tessellation in ShaderGraph yet, we cannot implement it into HDRP / URP at the moment. Unfortunately, just like with this feature, there are many many other useful tools that have not yet been ported to URP / HDRP. Once it is supported in a stable ShaderGraph release, we will include tessellation support precisely to improve situations like these
  
• Tessellated fur might be supported in the built-in renderer before our holiday break in beta form since tessellation is much better supported in Built-in based surface shaders.
  

We hope this helps !

 

Yep, that sounds great. I'll hold out hopes that tessellation officially makes its way into HDRP sometime in the next year . I'm not an artist and I don't have the funds to hire people, so anything that requires N number of models to change becomes too time consuming for me. Tessellation would really "just work", and for my situation, is the only real feasible option.

Thanks for considering this in the future, it would really help!!

 

No problem !

We really take into consideration every bit of feedback we receive (which is in part why XFur Studio 2 has been such a huge leap forward in features and ease of use compared to XFur Studio 1) but unfortunately in some cases our hands are tied and we need to wait until Unity decides to catch up

If in the meantime we find any other solution ( even if we have to label it as experimental ) we'll make sure to post an update here and let everyone know. Have a great week!

 

This probably can't work, but my brainstorm idea was if you could fake the tessellation in the "design studio" and just give a slider for how tessellated the fur should treat the model, then apply those lengths, that could probably yield smooth results without even needing a tessellated model (thus not requiring Unity to fix this, and also not requiring higher poly counts in game).

Basically, since you can already change the length / direction of the fur, is it possible for you to calculate those two factors based on the shape of the model after its been smoothed and just let us play with a slider for that at design time, purely changing the fur and nothing else?

 

Hi there,

As explained before, this is not possible. It is not possible to tesselate the fur only since the fur is generated from the source mesh whenever the mesh is rendered. The fur cannot be any rounder nor smoother than the base mesh, and the only ways to make the base mesh smoother would be by using a higher resolution mesh or using real-time tessellation (not yet supported by Unity's ShaderGraph).

You can indeed change the length and direction of the fur but these values can only be read / modified on each vertex of the source mesh, meaning that if you are, for example, adding fur to a cube, there will be no way to adjust the fur in such a precise way to make it look like a rounded cube or a sphere since there are just not enough vertices and polygons to store the length and direction information for such precise and small variations.

Again, the only solution for this is to use a higher resolution mesh or shader based tessellation, the latter one depending on Unity implementing it on their SRP and ShaderGraph workflow, unfortunately

 

Got it. I wasn't talking about tesselating the fur, I meant adjusting the fur's length/direction (just like we can already do) by using math under the hood to get as close to a rounded approximation as possible by checking what it would look like _if the model were tessellated_, and then adjusting that fur's parameters (just like if it were done manually in designer) to get it to be a closer approximiation of that. As in, the base length = 10, and then its trimmed down to create a curved look.

However, as I said, I didn't expect you guys to say thats something that can or will be done, was just hoping it could automate what can already be done manually, just in a more mathematically precise way to hide the base model's limitations.

I digress. Thanks for responding!

 

Question about the snow VFX:

I can't get it to look like its actually embedded in the fur as opposed to an artificial painted layer on top of it with no depth. Also, the masking is producing hard edges that don't look organic.

Is this expected (meaning, the quality of the VFX is less than the other stuff), or am I using it wrong right now?

I'm extremely happy with what I got out of this very quickly for a bison test. However, because the quality is so good there (in my opinion ) the snow stands out as not nearly as high quality.

I'm showing this off right now to people at work hoping to influence us to use it in future projects .

[Edit -- for our use cases (unlike my personal projects), it would be pre-renders ... so no worries on VFX if the dynamic stuff isn't as good. You already provide excellent color blending tools, so it wouldnt be hard to sort out how to do manually what I would need to do. Just confirming I'm not missing something important]

 

Hi there,

We suggest you to please get in touch with our support team through the support email with your invoice number / proof of purchase so that we can provide you with better assistance on this. That's the fastest way to get in depth help with the product and that way we can get into finer details that may not be publicly posted (code snippets, patches, etc).

You can see on our own bison test as well as on the Holly video (our main video) how snow can look (there are some updates coming to the VFX module as a whole) but to get into the finer details about why snow looks less realistic on your own model and see what improvements can be made we would need you to contact us through support.

We hope this helps !

 

Okay no worries. Sorry for spamming your forums. Loving the program, no worries!

 

No problem! It is not so much about the forum but rather about the best way to provide efficient support and assist you in a better, faster way

 

Update to version 2.1.1 is currently being worked on. Since it is a smaller update it will consist mostly of smaller fixes and general improvements :

Fixes and Improvements :

• Improvements to snow and rain effects in the VFX module
• Fixed a bug when changing the assigned renderer and replacing it with one with less material slots
• Fur strands R and G modifier parameters leave Beta and move into a new stable "Advanced settings" mode.
• Fur Rim boost leaves Beta.

New :

• New per-FX parameters in the VFX module (smoothness, penetration / interaction with fur strands)
• Physics Module mini-tutorial
• VFX Module mini-tutorial
• New, entirely optional, 12 samples basic shells material and shader. *Might be pushed back to a future update

While there is no established release date yet, we expect it to be available in the first half of November

 

We wanted to share with you a small render to celebrate the spookiest season

We hope you can have a great time, keep safe, and happy Halloween ! ​