[WIP] NeoFur - Fur, Fibers, Fuzzy surfaces and more!

Grass?

 

I would like to see a tutorial where the dry hair is getting wet and then back to dry hair in an animation.
So how can i make wet hair and save it somewhere to animate between a dry hair template and the wet hair template?

 

I think you'd need a custom version of the shader that can linearly interpolate between different material parameters and probably growth noise textures. At the same time, you'd be lerping the physical parameters on the fur asset itself.

 

Can you do something like that? If you can let me call you a god!

 

This guy does a pretty good job:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v4QwO

 

@AlkisFortuneFish
I don´t think so. In one video you can see hair length animation.
But you are right with the learping from state to state.
If we at least have the option to let hair/fur look wet like.

So @peet808 please show us how to make wet fur.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by hair length animation, hair length is just a physical parameter on the NeoFurAsset component, you can animate it at will, unless I am misunderstanding you.

But yes, it'd be cool to see a finished example of a wet/dry transition as a demo.

 

For wetness fur you also need to change just some physical parameter like clumpiness, shininess. My problem with neofur ist i do not have a clumpiness factor last time i used it but hope it will come or we will get a tutorial on how to get clumpiness by changing other values that look like clumpiness at the end.
In other 3D programms it is more or less easy to make wet fur.

 

That's basically why I said that you might need to lerp to a different growth noise texture, changing the overall shape of the strands to clumps rather than fine hairs.

I'd be interested to see what the official take on this is, though!

 

@RandAlThor - With our Unreal version we have clumping as an experimental feature. It's not something we've been able to get into the Unity version yet. The best way to handle it right now would be using splines but it's going to be pretty difficult to simulate the transition from wet to dry. One other thing which we've recommended in the past is varying the gravity and bend exponent to give the heaviness of wet fur.
--Pete

 

Hey everyone, I just wanted to give a quick heads up. We've just release NeoFur for Unity 2.0 with huge enhancements to visual fidelity and customization.

This is a free upgrade for all current users!!!

Here's a couple tutorials on what's changed and how to migrate your fur to the new version.

--Pete

 

Any news on the Mac optimizations?

 

Thank you peet808 for your answer.
Hope to the such a feature in the future but will try out what you wrote.

Does 2.0 cost any upgrade price depending that we barely have 1.0 in our hands?
Should not mean that i do not like a 2.0 and with many new things it should be a instead of 1.1 or 1.2.

 

@RandAlThor - Awesome question and thanks for calling this out for anyone else that was concerned: Version 2.0 is free for all current users. I'll update my previous post to include that.

@gecko - We've made some big improvements from v1 with regards to performance across the board, including Mac. The biggest thing you'll notice is improvements with memory usage and garbage collection which will definitely help with Mac & Mobile perf. We've also broken out the shader to 3 different shaders: Complex, Optimized, & Mobile which allow you to balance performance and visual fidelity.
--Pete

 

@peet808 Thanks, glad to hear that. I had been contacting about getting a beta version to test on Mac, since the last beta in November was so bad. Is that still possible?

 

EDIT: I've gotten some help from Neoglyphics via another channel, and now I have the fur looking good on my Mac. (I had to change the Fur Guide Gen Method to Normals, and then reduce the Shell Distance to a much smaller number, like 3 or 5.)

Performance is much improved from the November beta, though still not good enough for my purposes (about 5ms for the saber-tooth-tiger in the demo scenes, on a MacBook Pro with GeForce 750M card, and not much difference between Mobile, Optimized, and Complex). So I'm hoping for more improvements...

_______

Original post:

Well, I purchased it since v2 sounded good. But alas:

1) NeoFur knows that my Mac can't run Compute Shaders, and it gives me a warning in the console. If it's that smart, why can't it disable the compute shader? So I did it manually.

2) Performance is still terrible -- I disabled everything but the saber-tooth tiger, but still, FPS drops from 55 to 21 when I get close to the tiger. (That's in the editor, running on a MBP with Nvidia 750M GPU).

3) The fur on the saber-tooth tiger is extremely long and ugly. I guess I can start learning how to tweak the fur settings, but it would be nifty if it was set up to look good out of the box. Okay, now I looked at the documentation, but I sure cannot find the "Fur Length" parameter on the NeoFurAsset inspector, so I don't know what to do.

4) The Mobile scene had all the same issues.

So....I'm frustrated. Any suggestions? I certainly may be doing things wrong, but it's hard to know when it's such a mess right out of the box.

thx
Dave

 

Hey everyone,

For those of you experiencing the same issues as @gecko, we've been carrying out the discussion on our support forums. Feel free to follow along.

Here is a link to the discussion on our forums:
http://support.neoglyphic.com/topics/69-kernel-neofurphysics-not-found/

To sum everything up, there is currently an issue with fur guide generation on platforms that don't support compute shaders (Mac, mobile, etc). In the event that a platform doesn't support compute shaders, NeoFur defaults to the use of CPU Physics for its simulations but Morph guides are currently not working with that simulation method. We have some ideas on how to fix that as well as ways to make additional optimizations/features that will improve performance on non-compute-shader-platforms.

Cheers,
Wyatt

 

This was the most promising and impressive fur asset to date, and was our only hope at "furry" characters in our game, but sadly we missed the tiny 3 month window this product was available.

I'm really disappointing to see this project is pretty much abandoned.
We've waited patiently for 3 months for any news other than the vague statement provided, and emails to Neoglyphic from myself and others have seemingly been ignored.

Hopefully you're just busy moving things over, but any kind of update would be greatly appreciated as I'm losing all hope.

 

@HellsPlumber : Well, if it makes you feel better, they never got it viable on Mac or mobile -- the 2.1 update screwed things up completely but they then abandoned it in that state.

 

Waste of money.

 

Well I guess I saved some money then, sorry you guys were left feeling out of pocket.
Can you at least roll back to an earlier, more functional version?
We're only targeting Windows so Mac/Mobile compatibility wouldn't have been a big issue for us.
Anyone willing to share a license? Haha

It's truly a shame, it was really looking promising from the videos they provided at least.
I guess we just hope they pick this project back up and get it to a usable state.

 

Was the asset offered with source so we can expend and fix it ourselves?

 

THey had edited the OP march 8

Hypothesis, they got bought by some company, that sound like the typical blurb when that happen ...

 

Or going bankrupt. Hence a last ditch effort to raise money through sales.

 

Yeah, it's a typical generic vague business statement, some clarity would have helped keep some confidence I'll bet.
I'm not sure about bankrupt, they're still actively posting on Twitter, but emails and such seem to be ignored.

 

That's one thing that tells me they might be in judicial transition (aka chaneg of responsibility) so they can't really answer because the organisation has changed... at least from their point of view ...

 

They set up an FAQ for people during this transition, which actually suggests you email them with NeoFur questions.
But the email address they provided is rejecting incoming mail, and their general support email isn't responding.

Their Twitter is still active so at least they're still alive, but still the current situation is a little disappointing.

 

Hi
your email is not avalible.

 

They dead

 

They've come back to us recently, but it was new names, so to speak, so I'm guessing there's some sort of buy out happening.

 

I guess we can see where they have gone

 

Really need this plugin. how I they could sell one more licence.

 

I switched to Imperial Fur -- it's more limited than NeoFur), but I'm happy with it -- super easy to use, and very performant.

 

NeoFur had a cute look but it honestly NEVER WORKED without problems. I submitted bug reports and got weird sarcastic replies from support. Not even joking, one of the replies after I tried to document an issue was: "People keep telling me about this but no one can show me why it happens…". I bit my tongue. He had multiple reports of a bug and was berating the users. I let it go because what's the point, $20 gone, oh well. I now chalk it up to probably some weird interpersonal dynamics at the company, and he was probably venting about the situation on his end, not the users.

I switched back to ImperialFur when it was recently updated for PBR. I also have Hair Designer but tbh have not yet tried it's fur options…. I realize you don't know me and have no reason to consider my opinion, but you've dodged a bullet. My guess is they tried to monetize an existing asset for the bigger Unity market but didn't really have the developers or Unity programmers to support it. When it didn't work out they had no desire to follow through with it and left support holding the bag and dealing with irate customers. A red flag was they wanted to sell it outside the Asset Store so they could put all sorts of licensing conditionals on it.

Another red flag was they charged $19 just to TEST it. (spoiler alert, it didn't work)

 

Just a heads up to others who still have this plugin or wanted to use it, the DLL is managed code, so you can easily modify it to fix the remaining issues by using something like dnSpy or a C# dll decompiler. I believe they also released the source code on their website's download section, but I can't remember if it was actually the complete source or not. We've fixed the issues we've had with it using the blendshapes guide method (though we don't do mobile, so can't remark about those problems). One of the biggest issues with the plugin that I think was the cause of many problems was that one of the lookup textures wasn't actually being generated, you can see there is a duplicate preview texture at the bottom of the component. After fixing that in the plugin... a lot of stuff fixed with it.

 

The full source is available on the website. I am seeing an odd issue involving SkinnedMeshRenderers. In our game we have pooled objects with a SkinMeshRenderer and the Neofur component. We update the NeoFur component at runtime based on whats on screen (fur material and shell settings). Sometimes the fur doesn't bind correctly to the renderer so when things animate we see two versions. Also strange, alt+tabbing out of editor seems to cause it. Has anyone experienced this or worked around it?

 

Yes that was one of the issues we had as well. I believe I fixed that part by looking at the unity on focus callbacks being used in the plugin and changing what was called so it refreshed it properly. Fixing the faulty look up texture generation fixes many other issues. You'll see which one it is when you scroll down the component to the different pixely swatches that show at runtime, one is a duplicate and shouldn't be.

 

I think I may have done the same fix using OnApplicationFocus to refresh the data. I am not seeing issues with faulty look up textures so far. Maybe a different version?

 

Nah it's on the newest, it's not that it's faulty, but that there are two of the same texture lookup textures being generated that needs to be fixed (or it might have been that it's just not updating correct), I can't remember which one it was though.

 

It looks like the base and actual textures are close if not identical. Is this what you are referring to?

 

Nope, not those two. I don't remember fully. I'm guessing you're not using blendshape fur morphs though right?

 

Not yet... was that where the bug was?

 

Yeah

 

Ok good to know thank you

 

does a chance to support NeoFur on HD Render Pipeline??

 

No, they've given up on the asset.

 

I highly recommend XFur -- it's an amazing fur tool, and the dev does plan to support the SRPs.

 

Neofur from wip to rip in no time

 

I hate to Nekro bump but does anyone have a working version of the .dll for unity?
I get this compile error with 2018.2

ArgumentException: The Assembly UnityEditor is referenced by NeoFurUnityPlugin ('Assets/Singularity/Plugins/NeoFur/NeoFurUnityPlugin.dll'). But the dll is not allowed to be included or could not be found.

UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.AddReferencedAssembliesRecurse (System.String assemblyPath, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 alreadyFoundAssemblies, System.String[] allAssemblyPaths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2 cache, BuildTarget target) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/AssemblyHelper.cs:155)

UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.AddReferencedAssembliesRecurse (System.String assemblyPath, System.Collections.Generic.List`1 alreadyFoundAssemblies, System.String[] allAssemblyPaths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2 cache, BuildTarget target) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/AssemblyHelper.cs:161)

UnityEditor.AssemblyHelper.FindAssembliesReferencedBy (System.String[] paths, System.String[] foldersToSearch, BuildTarget target) (at C:/buildslave/unity/build/Editor/Mono/AssemblyHelper.cs:195)

UnityEngine.GUIUtility:ProcessEvent(Int32, IntPtr)

if anyone has any source that would be great, I tried opening the dll with a C# decompiler but I have no idea what i'm looking for, or at.

Any help would be wonderful as I am completely lost with how to compile with this dll file referencing the UnityEditor

 

Not sure if this is why the DLL is failing to load but Neofur uses unsafe code. Make sure that option is toggled in player settings.