Today, we share this very interesting resource, let’s understand how to create and manage grooming in Unreal Engine. Producing realistic looking hairs and furs in computer graphics has long been a major challenge for 3d artists. In the new white paper “Grooming for real-time realism: hair and fur with Unreal Engine“, we see how you can use the Unreal Engine to generate real-time hair and fur for your projects.
How to generate hair and fur in real time in Unreal Engine?
A hair and fur are organic structures made up of thousands of coloured locks with specific characteristics.
The particular sheen of the hair or coat, which we immediately recognize as such, is a result of the locks’ unique translucent and reflective properties, including their tendency to bunch and curl together.
These strands also react to forces like gravity or wind in ways that we, lifelong observers of hair and fur, instinctively recognize as natural.
The production of lifelike fur and fur for computer-generated imagery has been the subject of research and study for several decades, not only for animated characters in games and movies but also for training simulations for military, industrial and animals, among other fields.
Recently, Epic Games unveiled a system for rendering realistic looking hair and fur in real-time. In Grooming for real-time realism, we describe how the system implements advances in hair and fur rendering to make this process faster than ever.
Download the white paper and start exploring 3D hair and fur in real-time.
The white paper explores two use cases: human hair as seen in our MetaHuman Creator video ad and fur and feathers from the Meerkat video created by Weta Digital.
Either way, let’s take an in-depth look at the grooming process, including various workflows, best practices, styling and mapping techniques, and so much more. Plus, both the Meerkat demo scene and the MetaHumans examples are available as free downloads, so you can see the techniques in action right away.