Graphics XFur Studio 3. Fur within minutes for all your creatures. Supported on all rendering pipelines.

XFur Studio 3​

XFur Studio has been for many years now one of the top solutions for fur in Unity games. It has helped many projects for all sorts of devices (including AR / VR apps) to add realistic fur to creatures and animals within minutes, all without leaving the Unity Editor nor requiring any experience with third party software. All this while also being able to run in lower end and older hardware that has limited / no support for compute / geometry shaders, as is the case with many mobile devices with not properly implemented drivers or older specs.

Following that philosophy of ease of use and fast results we have decided to completely revamp the way XFur Studio works with our latest release, ensuring that the whole process of adding fur to your characters is faster, easier and more productive. Let us introduce you to XFur Studio 3:

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Main features:

• Add fur, customize it and groom it in minutes, all without ever leaving the Unity Editor.
• Wide range of settings to fine tune between quality and performance.
• Support for GPU accelerated physics.
• Support for weather & blood FX
• Support for fur color mixing
• Support for curly fur
• Support for XR
• Support for HDRP, URP and Built-in
• Easily export fur profiles to reuse them across different creatures.
• Fully documented, and with fully accessible source code.

For all people who has bought XFur Studio 2 - Ultimate Edition after March 1st, 2023, the upgrade to version 3 will be completely free. We are currently working on a set of tools to painlessly upgrade all your characters and fur profiles from version 2 to version 3 in a simple click.

XFur Studio will also be released in a more affordable version with only the essential components, for those that need good looking fur and nothing else.

XFur Studio 3 is in active development, and we will share more updates and new features here.

At the moment, the roadmap is:

• Upgrade tool for a better transition from XFur 2 to XFur 3.
• Demo scenes showcasing different types of fur.
• Improved rendering for stylized fur.
• Improved performance.
• Improved physics & weather FX rendering.

Please let us know any questions you may have about our tool. Thanks for reading!

 

Today we want to talk about XFur Studio 3's new UI :

The new UI is far easier to use and navigate, as well as a completely rewritten and redesigned XFur Studio Designer. This time, you will be able to style your characters and customize all aspects of their fur without having to open additional scenes nor taking any extra steps. Just press "Enter Edit Mode" directly on the XFur Studio Instance UI of your character, and style the fur right then and there. No extra steps, no other apps nor scenes. Everything just works.



The new XFur Studio Designer



With a different model, in a different scene :

 

This looks great! Is there a estimated release date ?

 

Hi there,

Thanks! We're finishing up the last details, testing and documentation, so it should be out before the end of the month.

 

The Auto-Upgrade feature for XFur Studio 3 allows you to upgrade any model using XFur Studio 2 to version 3.x.x in a single click:

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The look of your previous work remains, while adding all the new features and ease of use that XFur Studio 3 brings. All of it with the press of a button.

 

The rendering for Universal RP has been improved in XFur Studio 3, adding better support for SSAO as well as a generally improved lighting:

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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

 

The first update to XFur Studio 3 is now in the works. It is a general series of improvements in the way fur grooming works (which solves a series of issues in some edge case models) and how it interacts with animation.

Additionally, we have been working on improving our UV islands edge-filling system so that there are less noticeable cracks in the fur (which happens again with some edge-case models). This update is expected to land next week.

 

An urgent fix for the Physics module has also been issued as part of the Update. It fixes a null reference exception existing when entering Play mode with both Scene and Domain reload enabled.

The update will go live during this week.

 

This looks very interesting, congrats! Has it by chance been tested on a Quest 2? It definitely looks pretty heavy for a mobile device of that age but I'd be curious to hear how it performs.

Also, does it support Single-pass instanced rendering?

 

Hi there!

We know XFur has been tested on VR before but we're not sure about the Quest 2 specifically.

XFur is indeed a bit heavy on mobile, for our tests in AR with a Xiaomi Redmi 9 (base model) we had to reduce the DPI slightly to reach 30-60 FPS (depending on character complexity and closeness to the camera), something that is not usual in VR. Also, since on VR framerate is the top priority, you'd need to lower the fur quality aggressively.

XFur 3 does support Single Pass Instanced rendering however.

Thanks for asking, we hope this helps!

Edit : A typo. Meant XFur 3 instead of 2.

 

Thanks for that, very informative! Can the density of fur be reduced to compensate or is it less the density and more the CPU time in general or something?

Also, does that mean XFur 2 supports single pass but XFur 3 does not? (And does a license come with access to both?)

 

Oops, my bad! That was a typo. XFur Studio 3 supports Single Pass Instanced rendering.


And yes, you can reduce the density of the fur to improve performance or use Basic Shells for a slightly faster process in mobile, but the biggest cost comes from overdraw, which depends on the amount of effective pixels in the screen covered with fur. The LOD module in the Personal edition has settings to reduce overdraw, but it is just a partial solution.

So if your character covers most of the screen or your device has a very high resolution, performance will suffer as a result. This is what you should keep an eye out for the most. We hope this helps!

 

Wonderful! Thank you, that's really helpful! Might be worth putting that on the store page, it's a great feature to have!

Also not sure if you're aware but the documentation page is currently down

 

Thanks for letting us know about the website, it should be up again. Also thanks for your feedback, we will make sure to add it to the list of features on the store.

Have a great day!

 

Coming very soon in version 3.1.0 of XFur Studio :

• Experimental support for the Graphics.RenderMesh API using jobs + burst (you should see a performance gain in cases where many instances of fur covered meshes are running)
• Much improved support for TAA and motion blur effects thanks to the new API used.

This new mode has to be enabled by hand in the code by uncommenting the line #define EXPERIMENTAL_BURSTED at the very top of the XFur Studio Instanced script. You must have the Unity Collections and Burst packages installed in your project for this to work. By default, the line is commented and as such the asset will work as before this patch.

The new version will arrive in early September.