Hair

As this was my very first attempt at hair cards I did not want to waste too much time and tried to find really reliable resources and tutorials for the creation process. I was recommended by a friend from work to check out Adam Skutt’s amazing real-time hair card tutorial he found on Artstation. This was basically the main source of knowledge for me and I can easily say that going forward I can confidently create and experiment making hair cards utilizing the tips and tricks he taught in this very instructive video. The short course goes over how he generates the hair using Xgen within Maya which was then converted to a texture and then hand placed on the model. I can’t say that the process was very fun to do but it was a great learning experience and I’m very happy to have gone through it and highly recommend it to anyone looking to try out real-time hair.

Baking

Once all the topology and UVs are done, I moved on to baking the components. Now, the goal of getting clean bakes for me has always been about proper naming, bake groups and having a solid match between your low and high poly. I had quite a bit of baking experience using Marmoset so I knew what I could get away with baking into my meshes and not having to include in my topology. In some cases, I was quite aggressive with what was baked information and what was actually topologized, which really helped me keep a low poly count.

As I said before, the main goal is to make sure silhouette has priority. It’s crucial to make sure that at all angles your model has minimal noticeable faceting. This will show up most in round objects so sometimes you have to add a bit more divisions in those areas. Also, keeping in mind proper flow and consistency of mesh density across all objects. Now I’m not going to get into all the details and steps for proper baking as that takes a lot more time to explain but what I will say is that you really need to be patient and look at all the intersecting points and to make sure there are no artifacts and weird self-projections. That’s where the naming and proper organization using bake groups comes into play. Marmoset has made it very easy to keep things in order and to facilitate your baking process. It’s also really nice for iterating on light setups. Once all bakes are done, I export a normal, AO and material ID map from Marmoset. The material ID map is nice since it helps you select the components you’ve baked on such as stitches, bolts and little repetitive pieces that would normally take very long to hand paint within Substance Painter.