OOT hair alphas
globally
Posts: 122
Hello,
I don't suppose anyone has a fix for getting OOT hair working in blender? I seem to be having an issue with the alphas and or alpha blends. Is there a way of setting up the shader nodes with alpha blends or any other work around. Such a shame as most of my favourite hairs are from outoftouch.
cheers
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AFAIK, DTB and Diffeomorphic do not support custom shader other than Iray Uber and PBRSkin... You may convert OOT's hair blending shader to Iray Uber before export.
thanks for the reply. Will converting to uber help with the alpha blend problem though? I'm no expert but I believe that is why my OOT hairs look so blocky in blender. There must be a way to incorporate them back in to the blender shader.
You may also try converting the hair with Daz Hair Converter (https://github.com/jobutsu/DazHairConverter).
Blocky hair might be caused by one of these factors:
1. Too few transparent bounces. Go to Render Properties >> Light Paths >> Max Bounces and crank it up to 16 or 32 or even higher, if that's what ends up looking good.
2. One of the maps plugged into your shader has its color space set to sRGB when it should be non-color. If it's anything other than a diffuse map, it should be non-color.
3. You're using a principled hair BSDF node on a polygonal hair model. The principled hair BSDF is intended for curve or particle hair and has a faceted appearance on polygonal models. It can look good on polygonal hair with facets too small to be seen (it kind of has the overall character of chevybabe's backlight shader, which I guess may mean the backlight shader is based on the Chiang hair shader paper), but unless the hair is pretty far from the camera, this can make for a number of faces that's a nightmare to render.
Apart from that, OOT hair alphas are just alphas. I don't know about importing them with Diffeomorphic, which I don't use, but you can just grab them off your hard drive and plug them into the factors of mix nodes or whatever like you'd do with any other alpha. Forgive the jankiness of this pose, it wasn't meant to be rendered from this angle. This is OOT's Linda ponytail.
This being Blender, you actually can easily do a lot of things with the OOT hairblending alphas that are harder to achieve in D|S.
Just to clarify :)
I have a few shader presets in the store. The backlight shaders are Iray and are meant for plain old geometry hair, based on a wax type setting. The Real Hair Shaders and Line Zero Shaders are more like a glass shader imo, meant specifically for strand hair.
thanks so much for your explanation. Just what I needed.
out of interest what shader do you use for polygonal hair if not the principal?
You're very welcome, hope it helps!
The shader in those renders is just a regular principled BSDF shader. I don't think these are the precise settings I used above (I don't think the settings even stayed exactly the same between the renders. I seem to have made the hair shinier at some point), but it was something along these lines.
At the time I took this screenshot (five minutes ago), this character's hair was dark brown. In theory the transmission is low because darker hair is less transparent, and one would increase it for lighter hair colors. In practice, higher transmission values tend not to look great. Transmission on strand-based hair helps create that additional saturated band at one edge of the hair's highlight, as seen on real hair. On polygonal hair, it creates saturated highlights but they often land in the wrong places and are too orange. I haven't arrived at a satisfactory solution for Blender yet, but pursuing physically correct solutions isn't going to do it, because polygonal hair just isn't. It's fakery, so a good shader will have to be fakey too.
Anyway, this shader also isn't great for strongly backlit hair. For that, depending on the effect I want, I might crank the subdivision level up, use the principled hair BSDF, and just accept that the render is going to take a while. The results are not very realistic, but they can be beautiful in dramatically lit renders. Or I might render both this regular old principled BSDF shader and the principled hair BSDF and mix them during postwork.