Fur in realtime

[ArchangelTalon]

400 tris might be a push, depending on how you do it and what it's for.

One way would be to use lots of little alpha'd quads sticking out of the surface.

The other would be to use a multi-layered approach with an alpha'd texture on each of them, giving the impression of layers of hair (I recently used the technique here (http://topsecret.pouncingkitten.com/Devs/Merciless/beast03.jpg) and it worked pretty well). Think of the planes as being cross-sections of a patch of fur, with the alpha channel containing lots of random dots to represent this. Gets a bit expensive, though. 5 layers of this pushed a 6k model up to 10k.

I'm guessing that there's other techniques you could use like some form of steep parallax or something shader-based... but I'm not too clued on up on how to manage that or how well it would work.

[Clanker]

Hey MALicivs

A fur hlsl shader does exactly what you've done ArchangelTalon. It duplicates faces and map them with a little alpha texture. Nice effect on your beast =)
But it's also a very resources consuming method.

Depending on what result you want, you can fake it, with a fur painted texture, and some alphas (with normal maps if needed)

http://www.bobotheseal.com/portfolio/TitanQuest/IL_RatMan_TQ_Texture.jpg
http://www.bobotheseal.com/vids/BoBo_Hair_Demo.swf

[ocarian]

the fur effect Shader on this link :thumbsup:

http://www.xbdev.net/directx3dx/specialX/Fur/index.php

good luck MALicivs

[MALicivs]

hey nice! thanks for the replys people :)

the thing is, I cannot use any complex shaders so i'll have to stick to modeling the detail for the normal map plus use some polygons with alpha intersecting the whole thing and detailling the edges. something like the paws of that ArchangelTalon's creature plus that model by bobo that clanker posted.
i'll just have to play alot with the normal and specular I gess.

that is a really good technique though, and i'm gonna talk to the client to see if they plan on having some kind of fur shader in the engine.

thanks for the help and support guys. its really apreciated :)

[Clanker]

Usefull tricks for hair/normal map

http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

[MALicivs]

sweet link man, many thanks!

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