[DEPRECATED] PIDI - XFur Studio. Please follow the link inside to XFur Studio 2, our new version

Version 1.3 has been sent to the Asset Store, and XFur Studio is now also available on the Itch.IO store and, to celebrate its launch, it has a 20% off so you can get it for only 40 USD until August 31! :

https://irreverent-software.itch.io/xfur-studio
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Version 1.3 should be available for download early next week

 

And version 1.3 is now out in the Asset Store. Right now I am updating the documentation but the new components (FX Collision and FX volume) are quite self-explanatory and require no additional setups so I am confident they will give no problems

I hope they will help !

 

Can you explain a little bit about the XFur_Layer textures which are assigned to the Fur Gen Map slot? What's in the red, green and blue channel and how does it work? Because I want to try something more than what is provided in the package

 

Hi there!

The Fur Layer textures have been changing a bit between versions but they have finally reached a point where they will be stable

The information is used as follows :

• Red Channel : General fur shape/volume. This controls the general silhouette of the fur and should always use subtle variations without going too low in value. This prevents the fur strands from looking too uniform across the mesh, adding realism. It also influences greatly how snow and other effects penetrate in the fur
• Green channel : Not used yet. Reserved for versions 1.4-1.5
• Blue channel : Defines color variation between FurColorA and FurColorB. Used to create better and more realistic/interesting coloration results.
• Alpha channel : The actual fur strands. By using the thickness slider this value will be mixed with the red channel to give the fur its final appearance. Should be a soft grayscale so that the thickness value can have full effect.

I suggest that you take a good look at the provided textures and split them into grayscale channels to see how each channel has been used and the kind of gradients that are recommended for the shader.

I hope this helps!

 

Thanks for the detailed reply

 

Got v1.3 -- so how do I use the FX module? I enabled it, then created a cube and (guessing) attached the XFur_FXCollison script to it, and at runtime tried dragging that into the model, but no blood or snow appear...

 

HI there,

Did you set the intensity to 1 and made sure that your character had a collider+rigidbody (so it can detect collisions)?

All collisions with the FX Collider component are sphere shaped, if you need cube shaped collisions then you should use the FXVolume component.

Again, add the component, make sure that the effect intensity is set to 1 (and that the XFur System component of the target character has the FX module enabled and set to receive both Global & On Demand effects) and that the target character has a collider+rigidbody so it can detect collisions

I just sent an update to the store with a small demo scene and fixed documentation showing how to implement it so hopefully this will help. It should be approved in the next few days!

 

Here is an example of how to configure the FX Volume component :



The character has a collider and a rigidbody :




All FX you want to apply are set up to support On Demand events :





Which makes it work without any issues :




Hope this helps!

 

The update to version 1.31 was slightly delayed but will be approved next week with new sample scenes, updated documentation and a few smaller improvements.

Work on the September update has started, with many iterations over wetness effects, some progress on a new FX component that will allow you to add FX based on particle collisions (still early in development) as well as some progress on the new XFur Studio product, XFur Studio Mobile (which is being currently developed and tested on low end OpenGLES 2.0 smartphones)

Again, new samples and updated documentation is coming next week, and the September update will arrive on mid-late September . Hope this will be helpful for all of you!


Also remember that XFur Studio is available on ItchIO as well, with a 20% off until August 31 (a few hours left) and receives the same support and updates at the same pace as the main version here on the Asset Store

 

The new update is now online with the up to date documentation and the new sample scenes. Work keeps going on for the September update and for XFur for mobile.

I hope this helps, and that with the new documentation you can take full advantage of the systems introduced in v 1.3

 

XFur Studio mobile, running on an old and cheap quad core 1Ghz phone ( 80 USD phone, generic brand) with basic OpenGLES 2.0 support, 2 GB RAM, at 1280x720.

It is an 8 samples shader, with ambient lights, occlusion, specularity, shadows and grooming support. Weather effects are on the works right now to add snow and blood support to the mobile shader as well as general optimizations




The mobile version is still in the works, with both quality and performance under heavy improvements. The fur has been made purposefully coarse and thick to be more visible during the tests on the small screens of my smartphones.

Apologies for the low quality on some parts of the video, I don't have an appropriate setup to record the phone (not only its feedback) and the recording had to be done at night, but I wanted to showcase that it is indeed running on an actual Android device. However, to make up for it, the same demo is available here, in a dropbox link so you can test it on your own

Again, please be aware that XFur Mobile will be its own, separate product to be released in the upcoming months. ETA coming soon. Hope this helps!

 

excellent!

 

When I use the grooming function, I found that symmetric UV can cause undesirable result because the grooming direction is not symmetric. Is there a solution about this? Like generating direction map on the second UV channel?

 

Unfortunately not at this moment since the secondary UV map is used to let the 3D artist project and control the appearance of the fur strands while the third one is used by the plugin to store additional information needed for some of the core features.

However, it's not impossible to solve. Since this can indeed be an issue for some models, I'll send a patch before this weekend with either an additional shader or an additional setting to let you use the secondary map for grooming and have forced triplanar projection for the fur instead

I'll post an update here as soon as the patch is ready. I hope this helps!

 

The patch to allow for grooming to be painted over the UV2 coordinates has been sent to the Asset Store for approval and has also been updated on Itch IO (update will be available in the next hours). It will be available on the Asset Store later this week, as soon as it is reviewed and approved

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks for this quick reaction! This will be very helpful

 

There's another problem I met yesterday. I tried XFur on a skinned monkey, and I was basically following the steps of the document except that it is a child of a prefab and has some position and rotation offset(positon Z -5 and rotation X -90). I added a XFur System component to this child to add some fur and stored the parent as a new prefab(There is another weapon in this prefab without XFur component). I used multiple XFur materials on this character, by the way. I dragged this prefab into the XPainter scene and start painting. Then I found two problems when I was painting. First, I can not see the circular brush cursor, secondly I can not paint on some part of the model...

 

This is a screenshot of the error report.

 

Here's another problem I met today. It's something like this, I duplicate one prefab in the scene with XFur component one time or several times, then I delete one of them and the others turn purple unless I click them again. Is that a material update issue? Because I think this might be a potential problem if I use multiple instances of the same prefab in a scene?

 

Hi there!

I see. I will ask you to please open a PM conversation with me so we can follow this issue more easily since I will need you to send me screenshots of your scene and prefab and how they are configured. No matter how many times I tried on my end, both at runtime and on the editor, I could not reproduce this behavior. However, I believe I might have found the line that might be causing this issue and will send you a small patch through a PM to see if this helps.

About this, you need to follow the documentation in a more precise way. This means, do not try to paint a prefab nor any object that has other components/submeshes/objects that are not part of the character/model you need to paint. If you use a prefab or a complex model with colliders, scripts or other components these might interfere with the normal workflow of XFur Painter. This is why the documentation tells you to use the model directly and without any additional components. XFur Painter will only output textures for later use that you can then assign safely to your prefab, so there is no need to use the prefab directly on XFur Painter.

Also, make sure that your model has a 1,1,1 scale on the skinned mesh renderer component when dragged onto a scene since any other scale means that it was not exported/imported with a correct scaling and will produce undesired results (the resulting collider that XFur Painter generates to detect which area you are painting will be too small or too big, preventing you from painting). In the same way, any other collider at any point in the hierarchy of your prefab will prevent you from painting, and a very complex hierarchy on your prefab will prevent XFur Painter from correctly detecting it. If your model doesn't have a 1,1,1 scale you can either re-export it from your 3D app at the right scale or set the scale in Unity on its renderer component to 1,1,1

Finally, make sure that when you paint, especially if your character has several materials, that the material you want to paint is the material you are viewing in the XFur System UI since that is how XFUr Painter decides which model to paint.

I hope this helps and again, I will be opening the PM conversation to give you further assistance!

 

This is quite interesting. Our current projects are mobile, so lack of mobile support is a showstopper for now but looking forward to seeing where it leads. I am a bit disappointed that the current development path on mobile seems to focus on very low end GLES2 devices, while the devices we would target for any project with Fur would be Metal compliant iOS devices with compute capabilities and mid to high end GLES3 devices.

There is obviously value in developing for low end devices but there is also value in developing for devices that will be low end in the very near future. For example, we had a working demo with a fully furred character running on the iPhone 5s 2 years ago using the now dead NeoFur and that was using quite advanced features to support mobile even back then.

Still, watching this thread.

 

HI there,

Thank you for your interest on this tool

While indeed XFur Mobile is geared towards lower end mobile devices at the moment (GLES2) the current XFur Studio for desktop already "works" on several high end GLES3 devices such as some Samsung Galaxy phones (series 7 and above), provided that they support vector arrays. XFur has just never been advertised for mobile since there is a very big difference between devices and it will not work on lower end ones, which in turn would make many mobile developers upset. Thus, to avoid this, the main version of XFur Studio has only been advertised for desktop and higher end platforms with no official support for mobile.

The road map for XFur Mobile is to provide much lower end versions of the system and some equivalents to the Low-medium quality ones of the main XFur Studio to cover a wider range of mobile devices, from low to high end. No compute shaders are used on XFur (not even on the main version) and they are already fully compatible with Metal so this doesn't affect the end results in any way

My main goal with what I have showed so far is to give first an idea of how the fur will look on the lower end of the spectrum and from there move upwards, so hopefully once this new tool is ready in some months from now it can help your projects as well. Again, thank you for your interest and for following the development of XFur!

 

I'll follow your instructions here more carefully to see if I can paint everything as expected. I am assigned other work to be busy with today, so I believe I'll contact you with PM to see if I can solve the other stuff with your help on Monday. Thanks for your quick response anyway

 

Patch is now available on the Asset Store!

 

This is just a small heads up to let you know that starting with version 1.4 of this asset, Unity 5.4 will no longer be supported. The minimum version to use this asset will be Unity 5.6, with a specific version for Unity 2018.3 (compatible with the new Prefab workflow) coming very soon.

If there are any Unity 5.4 users of this tool that cannot upgrade for some reason, please let me know and I will do my best to extend support for 5.4 at least through version 1.4 since while it is quite complex to support so many different Unity versions I also want to do my best to not leave any users behind. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

 

Hello, just picked up your asset and it is a lot of fun to use. Im running into an issue though and its probably me doing something wrong/missing a step, but I cant seem to figure it out.

When I enter playmode my model is getting a white tint to it.


But in the editor it doesnt receive this tint.


Any help is appreciated!

 

First of all, thanks for using this tool!

I notice that there are a few differences between two pics (in Play Mode I cannot see the Skybox and I can see the white tint is not present in the areas covered by fur. It looks like a Fog effect that is interacting in a wrong way with the other shaders. I would need to see (and for you to check) if there are any differences between both views to rule out that there are other things interfering with the way the fur is being handled. Also, if possible, enable the Skybox on your scene during play mode to see if this removes the issue. If it does, it might have to do with the specularity/gloss settings that might not be working well without a skybox.

Hope this helps!

 

Yep, I didnt even notice that, nice catch. It was my main camera set to solid color instead of skybox that was causing the issue. All good now, thanks.

 

Glad to help!

 

I really like this asset, you did a really nice job. Very easy to use. I dont feel like I have spent more than 30minutes learning and painting the fur. The subtle results really make a big difference in selling the realism of the model when you add in your shader. not even just the shape, but the way its swaying as the model walks and blowing in the wind. I cant wait to try and make some mud to get the fur dirty and water/snow. thanks for making a great asset.

this still image doesnt do it justice.

 

Thank you very much for your kind words and for sharing your work (despite being a still image it does look great, it is a very very good model!), I'm glad to hear you are pleased with the results so far and with the current version of XFur, I hope it will keep being useful for your projects for a long time!

Thanks again!

 

Quick patch coming to XFur Studio next week. Only finishing up some details. It is a bug fix that might solve most "bald spots" issues present in a few models. This is however the first iteration of the patch, so please contact me if your models still present the bald spot issue.

I will update here next week as soon as the update goes live

Have a good weekend!

 

Patch has been sent for approval and more importantly, this will be the first release of XFur Studio to drop support for Unity 5.4.

The new minimum version required is Unity 5.6. If you are using Unity 5.4 and cannot upgrade to a newer Unity release please reply here on this thread and I will make sure to extend support for Unity 5.4 at least through XFur Studio 1.4.

 

Patch to version 1.36 has been approved. New minimum Unity version required is Unity 5.6 and now XFur includes a first fix for the "bald spots" issue.

 

I'm getting this error on some models at runtime (the LOD Module is enabled). Any idea what's going wrong?

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
XFurStudio.XFur_LODModule.Module_Execute () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/LOD Module/XFur_LODModule.cs:86)
XFurStudio.XFur_System.LateUpdate () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/XFur_System.cs:216)

 

Hi there,

I will look into this and get back to you with an answer ASAP. At first sight and looking at the code line in question, it could be one of two different causes :

- No MainCamera is available on the scene when the model is instantiated (there might be a camera but is not marked as the MainCamera). If this is the case, for now creating a Main Camera or setting your camera to be on the Main Camera layer might solve the issue, or editing line 58 in the XFur_LODModule script to say :

Code (CSharp):

1.  if ( !systemOwner || !systemOwner.database || !Camera.main ){

so the module is not executed if there is no main Camera defined (this check has been added as a patch to be approved for release next week)

- The Launch event of the LOD Module is not firing up correctly, and the XFur System that owns this LOD module is not being set properly. I will test for this case on my own as well, get back with the results ASAP and issue any needed fixes before the weekend.

I hope this helps!

 

As October begins, here is a small update on the roadmap for XFur Studio and the upcoming XFur Studio Mobile :

- XFur v 1.38 release, with new 12, 20, 28, 32 and 36 sample variants of the shaders. These variants are included as a separate Unity package included with the tool (to avoid extended compilation times for those who don't need them ) and will come with detailed instructions on how to add them to existing projects. Will be available next week

- XFur v 1.4 release with new FX Collision modules targeted at particle events as well as new fur coloration, randomization and general appearance settings as well as new Fur Noise maps. Will be available before the end of October

- XFur Studio tutorials (currently in progress and to be released during October-November) to explain in detail how to import the package, add fur to models, solve common issues, style the resulting fur, create custom noise maps etc. They will be available as public Dev. Logs on Itch. IO.

Planned for Mid-Late November to early December

- XFur Studio Mobile - Coming in a first release with both basic (Open GLES2 level) and complex (OpenGLES3 level) shaders which target a wide array of features for XFur, including simplified physics, full weather&blood effects, forward-based shadows (for high end phones), basic&complex lighting, 4 to 16 sample variants (on 2 sample steps), included XFur Painter 2.0 as fully featured as in the main XFur version etc.

I hope this will be very helpful for your projects!

 

Hello, my team is very interested in XFur. We were wondering if the idea we had in mind would be possible with this product and if it would be easy or difficult to achieve?

Basically, we'll have an animal model where you can add/remove/change different markings on top of the base texture as well as change its colours while in the character creator. Will the fur be able to remain on top and change accordingly with these added markings?

 

Hi there,

First of all, thank you very much for the interest on this tool!

At this moment XFur doesn't allow for markings to be drawn on top of what would be the fur texture itself ( the fur color and pattern) as if it was an overlay or a spray painting over the fur, though that function is coming very soon in the form of an update. Changes to the fur color and all the other fur properties both in real-time as well as with pre-defined profiles is doable with the already existing features and functions in the code itself. There are a few projects already using XFur which have made use of character customization to great effect.

If possible, a small screenshot of what you have in mind with these markings would help me a lot to be able to tell you with far more accuracy if it is already possible in XFur or if it will come in a later update

Hope this helps!

 

Update 1.38 with the new shader variants for 12, 20, 28, 32 and 36 samples is ready and will be sent for approval to the asset store shortly. Should be available around the weekend!

 

Version 1.38 is now available on the Asset Store and Itch.IO for download. Hope it helps!

 

The fur grooming tool doesn't seem to be working for me in xfur painter. I've selected the grooming tool and I'm left clicking and dragging but it isn't doing anything to the fur. Do you know why this might be happening?

 

Hi there,

Have you set up the Fur Direction Vector (in the XFur System component) to a value higher than 0?

If you are using the "Original" grooming method you should set it up to a low value (between 0 and 1) but if you are using the newer "Accurate" method then you need to set it to a higher 1.5 - 3 value.

Please also make sure that the brush (the blue circle) is visible in a correct way over the model's surface, to rule out the possibility that the scale/collider of the model were not assigned correctly by XFur.

If it helps you more, you can share a screenshot of how you have configured your XFur System component, as that might help me find out the reason more efficiently. I hope this helps!

 

It's working! I did just need to change the direction vector value to more than 0. Thank you for the quick reply and help. The fur is really good by the way, you did a great job with it!

 

Thanks, I am glad you like it and to hear it is working without issues now !

 

A small fix patch will be issued later this week before the release of v1.4

On another note, new in-depth tutorials are now available on Itch.IO. This is a series currently in progress but it already covers the basics on how to add fur to a model (thanks to @Malbers for his awesome Raccoon model, which is used in these tutorials ). Here you can read Part 1 of this series

 

Version 1.4 of XFur (with new XFur Noise maps) as well as the brand new feature that allows particle systems to add snow, blood and other effects through particle collisions will be available before the end of next week.

 

A small first test of the new Beta feature of Particle Collisions driving the FX over the fur surface :

 

The Secondary Fur Color works nicely on some of my models, but not on others -- that color simply has zero effect. I can't figure out why. Using Material or Instance doesn't matter....anything else I could check?

 

Hi there,

The variations between Fur Color A and Fur Color B depends entirely in a combination of 3 parts : the UV2 channel of your model, the Fur UV2 coordinates used on the XFur System component and on the blue channel of the XFur_Fur Layers texture used. Some of the textures provided have very slight or no variation on the blue channel which will produce slight or no influence of Fur Color B. This is used to produce different "textures" so to speak in the final fur. You can freely customize the way Fur Color A and Fur Color B are mixed by simply modifying the blue channel of any of the provided XFur_FurLayers textures.

I hope this helps, if you have more doubts about this please PM me to give you more assistance

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