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

So if we want to disable it (it's a cool effect, but if we can't moderate it, we'd just as soon remove it without much sadness), we just remove that line of code and don't do anything else?

 

If you want to remove the snow effect entirely you just set the snow intensity to zero. If you want to prevent the wind from having ANY effect over the snow you would just change that line of code into whatever direction you want the snow to come from. If you want the snow to come only downwards, then you would change that line of code to :

Code (CSharp):

1. snowDirection = Vector3.down;

And then the wind won't have any effect at all over the snow, and no matter how strong the winds are then the snow will deposit only on top of the characters and never on the sides. If you want to implement a more complex algorithm to modify the snow direction and how it is influenced by the wind or to have it follow the direction of another object, system, etc. then that same line of code would be the one to change

Hope this clears things up!

EDIT :

And if you just want it to be less pronounced then you can do :

Code (CSharp):

1. snowDirection = Vector3.Lerp(Vector3.down, windDir, windIntensity/16 );

 

less pronounced is what we really want, so thanks! (And I should remember to change this again once I get 1.5, right? The patch is coming later?)

 

It should be ready to download later today (since it was approved a few minutes ago and from approval to being live it takes some hours ) and yes, once you update you should make this change. I will include options to control this in a small patch next week as well.

 

XFur version 1.5 is now live and available for everyone !

We hope it will help everyone and make XFur a better addition to all your projects.

Have a nice weekend!

 

So is there anything we should do in order to get the performance improvements of v1.5?

And we are using Unity LODGroups, so once it switches from LOD0 with xfur to LOD1 without xfur, there should be no performance impact of xfur from that model, right?

 

Hi there,

The performance improvements were a series of internal changes made to XFur. There is not much you need to do to take advantage of them. The internal update functions have been moved, for example, to timed events that happen only once every few frames which by itself improves performance a good deal.

Regarding the LOD Groups, this will depend entirely on if the XFur component is disabled by the LOD group or not. If the LOD Group only disables the renderer but the XFur component remains enabled, then it will keep trying to execute some operations. You would need to ensure that it is disabled alongside the renderer. If you enable the LOD module of XFur however ( which is recommended ) all the heavy operations should be turned off at a certain distance and, if on top of this, the renderer itself is turned off by the LOD Group then the impact of XFur should be close to none.

I hope this helps. Have a great weekend!

 

Okay, great!

I'm not sure how LODGroups work, but the object apprarently isn't disabled (at least looking at it in the scene hierarchy, so maybe we should write some code that disables the xfur_system at a certain distance, right? But when I disable, then reenable xfur_system, there's a spike in the GPU profiler -- though it's "Other" so I don't know if that would be a problem in a build...any ideas?

So the xfur LOD module has a Max Distance setting -- but what happens when further than that? For example, I set that to 5, and move the camera 15m away -- the wolf still has the Four_Samples shader on it, but actually xfur isn't doing any significant operations at that distance?

thanks!
Dave

 

Hi there,

The XFur LOD module stops most of XFur's internal processes when the object is further away than the max distance or within the smallest LOD. Indeed, it should stop most of its more expensive operations.

The GPU spike, especially if it is showcased as "Other" might be caused by any number of reasons and many of them could be exclusive to the exact implementation you are making so I cannot give you much help other than the only way to truly test its impact on a build would be to actually build and test.The GPU spike might be some cache of materials, properties or the XFur UI itself and those would happen only in the Editor, but since the spike is labelled just as "Other" it is difficult to know exactly what is causing it.

I hope this helps!

 

With v1.5, we're still seeing significant spikes when characters with xfur are spawning in the game. Is there anything we can do about this?

 

Hi there,

I am issuing an urgent patch to solve this before this weekend. It seems some of Unity's functions regarding material shaders, instancing and properties ( which are necessary for generating the runtime versions of XFur ) are generating an excessive amount of overhead, but I have found a workaround that reduces this from ~30ms (like in your pic) to around 0.8ms per instantiated prefab as long as you pre-load the materials to the scene ( which can be achieved by having 1 instance that uses the materials ALREADY on the scene beforehand ). This performance improvement is the best I can do at the moment since some of these internal Unity functions are really expensive in Unity 2017+, and some of them ( I see some calls to MaterialPropertyDrawer) are exclusive to the Editor, so I expect to also see some discrepancies with an actual build.



Here I instanced 7 copies of "Lucy" at runtime all at once, with a total overhead of 6ms. This is with the profiler enabled which also tracks many internal editor only functions, producing additional overhead and making the actual speed of the code around 50% slower. In an actual build, overhead would be closer to 2-3ms for every 10 instances spawned at once making it practically unnoticeable.

I know these spikes are an inconvenience, but the internal workaround for this is coming and will be ready and available by Monday-Tuesday. Hope this helps!

EDIT : Added more information, a screenshot of the profiler on my own device after spawning 7 instances and a small explanation of the present conflicts between profiler and XFur functions

 

Great, thanks!

So preloading 1 instance of the materials -- that means one instance of each character-material (wolf, bear, etc.), right?

 

If you are using different materials for each, yes

Internally, XFur creates runtime variations of the materials so it can switch between 4,8,16 samples etc. without actually switching shaders. XFur generates a static dictionary so that all XFur entities sharing the same original material reference the same array of runtime variants.

As recommended by the documentation, it is better to have 1 global XFur material and adjust individual parameters through the XFur profiles and per-instance parameters as this reduces the performance overhead a LOT since XFur will generate only 1 global array of materials that every instance in the game will reference and parametrize in real-time instead of one different array for every type of animal.

With this setup, you could have a basic, general XFur material shared for every single animal in your game (and parametrized through the XFur System itself) and only load 1 animal instance ( be it the player's character, an NPC, etc) and this would work just as well as having different materials for each.

Again, the fix will be available very early next week with more detailed instructions ( posted here and in the docs ) about how to take advantage of the performance boost. I recommend you to wait for the patch before making any big changes to your scene, materials, or to how your prefabs are managed. I hope this helps!

 

Thanks for all the details. I missed that info about having 1 global material, we'll look into doing that once the patch is available.

 

Once you are ready to do this, please remember to export fur material profiles for all your animals to avoid any loss of data ( since when you switch materials the individual data can get overriden ). I hope the patch will help and hopefully I have some time to improve a bit the material switching sections of the code in the same patch to make the process easier

 

Patch v1.51 is live and ready to be used. Some internal modifications have been made as well to ensure that an XFur system that has been set up to read properties from the instance will retain said properties even if the materials are swapped instad of being overwritten as it happened in older versions.

The performance impact when instancing prefabs has been greatly reduced but to take advantage of it you MUST preload your materials by having an XFur character or object that uses said materials in the scene at load time. After this, any subsequent instance using those same materials will be instanced in less than 0.8ms


This patch will be the last version of XFur to support Unity 5.6 unless extended support is requested by several users. This is because of recommendations by the Asset Store team to move towards LTS and newer Unity versions and because of the high difficulties that supporting so many different Unity versions with quite different features presents while developing and mantaining our tools and assets.

The minimum supported version for XFur starting with v1.6 will be Unity 2017.1 and by September only Unity 2017.4 (LTS) and above will be officially supported. Again, we are open to extending support for 5.6 if enough people need it, so if your project is locked to Unity 5.6 for some reason please get in touch

Have a great day!

 

Hi. I bought this on my other account, Wolfride2, and I just wanted to say that you CAN mix PIDI fur with Nvidia hairworks if you're one of the rare people who were able to implement it. I wanted to test to see if I could have part of my model be much longer hair from Nvidia and the rest of the model be the quaint short hair from PIDI and this is the non groomed non modified result of just blending them both:

With Hairworks removed on the legs of one side due to the bones being named the same and unintentionally but nicely moving all the fur one way:


So for those wondering, PIDI won't cause hairworks to spaz like a wind turbine, providing you're good at adjusting the results. Initially it will cause all of the hair to bunch into one spot and spaz, but if you play with bend stiffness/damping you can get a really nice result that lays naturally and doesn't move at all, 0 movement, at interaction stiffness 0 and 0 wind. Turn the interaction stiffness up a bit or set some wind and it shimmers beautifully.

 

So with the latest release we noticed in our project that the Fx and physics modules are both broken. There's a hard code of 128 for the position array and we have 211 bones so the modules flags and out of bound array error and also we're getting a Lod Level of 99 which creates problems. Further more the local wind doesn't seem to work.

Any insight?

Thanks

Here's our temporary fix :

 

Hi there,

SInce the very beggining XFur's physics module has always supported only 128 bones, this has not changed in any of the versions and said hard coded limit has been in place since v1.1 and as such I am not sure why it would break any of your objects unless you had already performed some kind of workaround before the update and, with the update, it was overwritten. The only changes made to XFur in the current version were done in the material generation and synchronization section, with the mesh and internal data generation left untouched, with the only changes to the FX module being on its internal map ( it starts with all colors set to 0,0,0,0 instead of black ).

In order to make a quick test however, I imported XFur into a new project directly from the Asset Store and tested with a couple of models from the Asset Store as well, and as long as those models are within the limits specified in the documentation and this thread's first post ( 128 bones ) everything works as expected in this version, I could not reproduce the issue.





Please PM. with more details about the model, which Unity version you are using, in which XFur version were things working and, if you still have it, a copy of the XFur System script (and other modules) you were using when it was still working to try to find any differences that may be causing this error and track down if the changes were custom workarounds taht existed in your project, an unwanted consequence of this update that is affecting your specific project or any other bug, and do our best to help you solve this situation.

While a quite intensive overhaul of the physics system is being developed to allow for custom bone definitions and rigs with more bones, this won't be available in the short term and for the time being the bone limit for XFur will continue to be 128 bones.

I hope this helps!

 

Thanks for the reply, we were missing the xfur windzone component for the fx module in our scene, hence the non existent wind working sometimes if the material was eddited in the painter2.0 scene. How big of a performance drain are we looking at if we have 165 bones?

 

Right now, each bone of the character up to the limit of 128 is tracked by the physics module. While the 128 bones limit is likely to stay for a while, there is an update coming coming sooner ( probably by late April - mid May ) which will add the ability to define which bones are tracked so in theory, even if you have a model with 200 or more bones you could set the physics module and XFur to track only 6, 8 or ten bones, having a much improved performance. This update will come with the new version of the randomization module in XFur 1.6

Thus, if you manage to get 165 bones working in XFur right now the performance impact could be considerable1, especially if you have several instances with such large bone counts in place. Unfortunately, right now the most complex rigs we have used with no noticeable performance issues had ~60 bones, so I am unable to provide exact numbers for a rig with that bone count. I hope this helps!

 

Thank you very much for sharing this information, it is really good to know that both systems can be used together and it may open some interesting additions and developments for the future of XFur, both for users and for us as developers as we keep updating and improving the system

Thanks again!

 

I'm setting up xfur on a new model: added xfur_system to the model, assigned the xfur database to it, assigned the xfur 16 sample shader to the model's material...but on xfur system, it says "This material is not a fur enabled material" and I can't figure out/remember what to do about that. Sorry, can you remind me?

EDIT: Oh, i'm getting some errors I don't recall seeing before, below.

EDIT2: And on one of the models I had set up previously, it has that error/warning, and doesn't look very good now. I've rebuilt it several times, no luck. What am I missing?



Texture '' is degenerate (dimensions 0x0)
UnityEngine.Texture2D:GetPixels()
XFurStudio.XFur_FXModule:Module_Start(XFur_System) (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/FX Module/XFur_FXModule.cs:51)
XFurStudio.XFur_System:XFur_Start() (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/XFur_System.cs:167)
XFurStudio.XFur_System:Start() (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/XFur_System.cs:96)

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
XFurStudio.XFur_Painter2.PaintMesh () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/XFur Painter 2.0/XFur_Painter2.cs:399)
XFurStudio.XFur_Painter2.LateUpdate () (at Assets/PIDI Game Development Framework/PIDI - XFur System/XFur Studio Source/XFur Painter 2.0/XFur_Painter2.cs:334)

 

Hi there,

I encourage you to please reach us for support requests through either the PM conversation we have opened for you before or to our email to be able to provide you with faster help and to make any follow ups more easily than here in the main thread

However, regarding the issues you are seeing :

I would suggest to remove the XFur system component entirely from that model and to re-assign it again as something may have gotten corrupted with your prefab at some point. Re-assigning the component, all the textures and materials may solve the issue and if you have already saved the grooming, fur data maps and fur profiles it should not take more than a couple minutes.

About your other problem ( regarding XFur not recognizing the material as an XFur enabled material ) you need to first assign the material to the model and then assign the Xfur System and XFur database to it, in that order, as specified in the documentation. If for some reason you forget to do it this way, assigning the XFur material to the material slot of the XFur System component rather than the material slot of the Skinned Mesh Renderer ( or switching back and forth with two different XFur based materials again through the material slot of XFur System ) will forcefully reset the internal material references of XFur and solve the issue.

I hope this helps!

 

Wow, that was easy! All fixed now on both models. (I did review the docs but missed that key sequence requirement.) Thanks much -- I don't think we could live without xfur!

 

No worries, glad to hear everything is solved!
Have a great day, and thank you for keep using XFur, after all it is the users' support what keeps this asset alive and evolving

 

Currently we are working on several updates to XFur, including some rather major ones that will change the whole way the asset looks and works. While this work is still far ahead and will not be ready until ~September, we are also working hard on improving the documentation and tutorials for this asset.

If there is a section of the tool, a part of the fur-generation process or some other topic you would like to be covered in more detail feel free to post it here

We will also be working on improving the randomization and pattern creation of the fur as well as adding some tweaks to the UIs to make them easier to use and understand. We hope you all will like the updates as they come in the following months!

 

As part of the May Madness sale, we are happy to announce that you can get XFur Studio with a 50% OFF, only 25 dollars!
This offer will be available until May 15.

Have a great weekend!

 

A small patch will be released for XFur later this week which will add automatic handling for some basic errors present in some models regarding their transform components ( scale other than 1,1,1 , wrong rotation / position ) as well as to handle some other small mesh related issues for you. However, this is not a 100% perfect approach so the documentation will also be updated to more clearly indicate all these requirements and potential workarounds to solve them.

This patch will also be the first version of XFur that will no longer support Unity 5.x.

XFur 1.7 will be released in late May-early June with the following changes :

- Additional randomization parameters
- Re-working of internal code to make future upgrades easier
- Improved FX module
- Improved randomization module
- Improved API
- Improved Weather system.

 

Initial patch for XFur will be sent for approval later today and should be available for download during the weekend. It includes :

• FX_Module fix which removes the warm up steps seen in some models
• FX_Module fix which will automatically handle meshes with wrong transformations ( rotation ). A second patch to handle scale will be released soon as well. THIS FIX IS NOT A PERFECT SOLUTION, FIXING YOUR MODELS IN YOUR 3D MODELLING APP IS STILL HIGHLY RECOMMENDED AND THE BEST SOLUTION.
• Coating_Module (randomization ) fix for a bug that prevents the module from displaying its interface and assigns random fur profiles to non-fur enabled materials.
• Small fixes across the board.
• Initial work for the Randomization module improvements in version 1,7

 

This is an important notice :
We will be away from our main workplace during the rest of May and the first weeks of June, which means that our replies to support requests might be slower than usual. Please be patient, as we will keep doing everything we can to reply to them all.

During this week however, we will be unable to reply to any support requests after Wednesday (May 15) and won't be able to resume the support service until next Monday / Tuesday (May 20-21). We apologize for any inconveniences this causes.

Thanks for reading!

 

When switching the graphics api from DX11 to DX12 or Vulkan, the fur explodes all over the place. Are they not supported?

 

Hi there,

As explained in the post above we are away from our main work space, which means at the moment we are not able to perform all tests we need to corroborate compatibly with dx12 and vulkan. The shaders in Xfur are, however, surface shaders so they should be able to work with those platforms.

But at least in the case of DX12 I can see it is states that it's still in expetimental mode even on unity 2019 which means we do not support it, since we never support beta/experimental unity features as they are subject to many internal changes on unity's side. Maybe these changes are causing the issues you see, I would expect them to be ironed out once both platforms are labeled as production ready.

I hope this helps!

 

Hi, I bought this fantastic plugin. The fur works well with everything except motion vector. So there is no motion blur on objects with fur. Taa also works bad with this fur, ghost effect is quite obvious
Is there a way to solve this problem?

 

Hi there,

As mentioned above we are currently away from our main workspace which means that fixes and support are handled a bit slower than usual. However, I will check the issue you report during the rest of the day to try to give you a solution as soon as possible. I hope this helps!

 

Hi there,

Unfortunately I cannot try to develop a full fix until I am back at our usual workplace which won't happen until next week. However, I have been making several tests duing the day and I have noticed that TAA and motion blur have several issues (including ghosting effects) when dealing with small details such as tiled textures or detail bump mapping, even on the standard shader. This means that a small, finely detailed effect such as fur may not be fully compatible with TAA/Motion blur unless the tool you are using for those effects are more advanced and have built in solutions for both fast moving objects and small details.

I will try to research more and see if there are any solutions I can implement (but motion vectors+multi pass+surface shaders are usually an unstable mix so there's no guarantee that a full fix can be developed) once we are back to our main office next week. I hope this helps!

 

Thanks anyway!

 

Hi there,

After coming back to our office, I have made some tests with Vulkan :



And I can see that the fur behaves as expected. This is on Unity 2019.1, the latest version. Please verify that there are no other errors with your setup / character model / fur settings / project settings as any of these could be the reason behind the errors you see.

It may also be related to the scale of your model, as any other scale than 1,1,1 on the mesh itself (upon importing it to Unity) may produce issues.

DirectX12 is still labelled as "Experimental" in Unity 2019.1 and is thus not supported.

I hope this helps!

 

Hello.

I just bought this plugin and I'm stuck at setting up the hair length.I'm trying to set up the mane of a lion but at max length the fur looks about an inch long which won't work at all. Please help.

 

Hi there,

We invite you to please contact us at our official support email (support at irreverent-software dot com ) with additional information so we can properly help you with this support request

Many support requests take several messages, require us to send and receive information that might not be possible to release publicly and thus this public forum might not be the best place to handle them.

We will need you to please send this request to our email with the following additional information :

• Copy of your invoice as you got it from the Asset Store when buying the asset.
• Unity version you are using
• Specs of your device
• Screenshots of the meshes transform (as explained in the documentation, wrong location/translation/scaling on models can and most times will produce wrong results with XFur)
• Alternatively, a copy of the model itself
• Screenshots of the XFur material you are using (to see its configuration)

Once we have this information we will be able to start looking into a solution for the issue

As an additional recommendation, if you are going to make a mane for your lion, I would suggest making some modifications to the model and assigning a different material to the region that will have the mane. XFur, as a shell based shader, will need many shader passes to produce fur as long as a lion's mane if you have not modeled any helping geometry and you will struggle more than necessary if you do not add an additional material just for the mane assigned just to the corresponding region. Long fur is expensive to render in real-time, thus if it will only cover a small portion of the creature it makes sense to assign a specific material only to that region so that only that portion of the geometry uses the high-sample count shader while the rest uses a shorter, more performant fur.

I hope this helps!

 

Thanks for quick reply, please clarify the contact details. What is the exact email address? (in email@website.com format)

 

Hi there,
We received your email as expected and have replied to it, so do not worry, you got the right address

As a general rule of thumb we do try to avoid posting our email in full to reduce the amount of spam we receive, but you can easily find it at the end of the manual included with the asset

We have finished our working day since a few hours ago and thus we won't be able to keep reviewing your support request until tomorrow morning. We may need you to send us a copy of your mesh as we believe that there may be some unusual aspects of it that might be interfering with the normal behavior of XFur and having a look at the model may help us solve the issues much faster, but again we will review it more in detail and contact you again in the morning, once we are back at work.

I hope this helps!

 

This is a small update to let you know that due to the summer vacations we will be away from work from June 30 to July 22. During this period, our support service will be unavailable except for a few news updates here on the forums.

We apologize for any inconveniences this may cause, but as soon as we are back we will be fast to reply to all your emails and support requests.

Have a great day!

 

Hi there, Ive bought this amazing fur plugin. Really fantastic!
But I found a bug and tried to solve it by myself but failed.
The fur direction is changing when the gameobject rotates

 

Hi there,

We are currently away due to the summer vacations but this issue (although not present in every case) will be addressed by an upcoming patch. This patch will be released after July 22, when we are back. Please make sure that the root of your object (the root transform shown in the Skinned Mesh Renderer) is an object with local axes matching those of Unity. If you are unsure, just assign the root object from your model to the root transform slot of the skinned mesh. This wil not break any animations, it will just adjust the way normals and other internal data is handled by Unity and may help with the issue you see.

For the time being and until July 22, we will be away from this forums as well besides a few news updates here and there, apologies if we do not reply timely to any further posts. We thank you all for your understanding

We hope this helps and thank you very much for your kind words !

 

Thanks a lot!

 

XFur Studio will receive its update 1.8 by the end of July. It includes smaller bug fixes, some improved features and a better support for Unity 2019.1

It will also remove support for Unity versions lower than 2017.4. We will talk more about the details of this update very soon

We will be back on July 22 to keep working at full force but, for now, have a great summer!

 

Just a few news about version 1.8. As you may have noticed, we skipped version 1.7 which was planned for the month of June. the reasons behind this, and the reasons we are going instead with version 1.8 are the following :

• Version 1.8 will bring some very asked features including the ability to define which bones are affected by the dynamics (physics) system
• Several fixes across the board have been implemented in the last weeks
• An overhaul of the whole randomization module is being implemented
• Some grooming bugs have been fixed as well
• The tool has been upgraded to Unity 2017.4 and is being heavily tested for any bugs under 2019.1
• And most importantly, we are currently working very hard on XFur Studio 2, which will bring many, many new features and a heavily improved way of rendering fur (and, hopefully, more than standard fur! )

XFur Studio 2 is , in many cases, a re-write and heavy improvement over everything that we have learned and developed during the XFur Studio 1 cycle. While we cannot give much information at the moment since many of the new features, while promising, are under fast iterations and labelled as experimental (and demanding that we implement some quite complex internal systems to give you an easy upgrade experience), we can also tell you that this release will be packed with things that many of you have asked for during the last year, including support for many of Unity's new features.

We have no ETA yet for XFur Studio 2 nor much information about how the upgrade to the newer version will be handled, and we apologize for the slower than usual updates on the current version. We are, however, confident than the wait will be worth it

We will be back at work on July 22, and wish you all a wonderful summer!

 

I'm waiting for this new version before buying the asset, because I use unity 2019.1

 

Hi there,

The current version of XFur is fully compatible with Unity 2019.1 already (it was sent to the store from this specific version as well as from 2017.1 and 2018.1 to guarantee better compatibility) and is expected to receive new updates for improved compatibility as well before we move to 2.0, so if compatibility is your worry fear not, because the current version is in full support mode right now

Sorry if I was not clear in the previous post, we meant 2019.1 bug tests more in the sense that we are experimenting with some new features only available in newer releases both for the current XFur Studio release and for XFur 2. Hope this helps!