Hair too good to look real
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,416
in The Commons
Something I notized with most hairs, male or female: They look totally dense. And most of them have a hairline which looks like the cut border of a lawn. Not natural looking. Is that something technical? I wonder if it's just too difficult for the artists to make less dense hair with a irregular hairline (it can be made, there are some examples), of it it is us, the customers, who want such dense hair.
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It depends on which type of hair you're talking about. If it's transmapped hair, which I think has been the most popular over the last decade or so, it mainly consists of a skullcap, textured to look like a persons scalp, plus big strands of hair layered on top like overlapping leaves. Those overlapping leaves have some transparency to make them look like individual hairs, but they have to be pretty dense to hide the scalp underneath. As for the hairline, that's up to the artist.
Other types of hair are becoming more popular, but I think the majority of it is still transmapped.
Maybe more natural hair con only be done with fibermesh hair, but these hairstrangs ore often too thick for a balding, aging person.
I guess fibermesh is a step in the right direction. I haven't had much luck with it, it slows down my renders, but it looks more realistic.
It probably all comes down to the transmaps, if the polymesh strips/leaves are UV mapped in a vertical manner you can swap out the opacity maps with sparser ones from other hairs, some are more jagged or skewed too.
Out of Touch has some of the most realistic hairlines and parts that show the scalp.
Fibermesh assets are like a nuclear bomb for performance and render times