Hair Strand Designer - Updating The Wig Demo Textures

Hi in this video, i want to show you how to make use of hair strand designer to update an existing mesh such as this one, which is free from sketchfab. This is one that i made a couple of years back when i initially made hair strand designer very early version and, as you can see, it looks pretty decent uh. So i'm just going to download this it's free to download and i'm going to try and apply a new texture and things to it. So i'm just going to go for original format, and that will give me all the textures and things that are with it. And i can use that as a tracing platform, so it's going to show in folder here, okay, so what you can see is there's a source and textures, so the textures are the texture passes used for this mesh and you see it's just a simple normal map. Uh, the opacity map and the color map and the rest is driven through some shader things inside sketch inside sketch, sketchfab's renderer and there's the mesh okay. So the mesh isn't going to be imported to hair strand designer, but it can be. You know loaded up inside your 3d application, i'm going to be using marmoset toolbag 3, because it's really good for showing off hails and things like that. It'S got a very nice hair, renderer and anisotropy type algorithm. So i've got a mesh there. I can input that simply by dragging it in and it's brought in some of the textures with it. We'Ve got the normal map albedo and the alpha map just going to change this to red channel because it doesn't read the alpha channel. I don't want to click on the mesh and do disable callback faces to see both sides. Now you can see the texture, for this is just the rgb driven texture map and that's basically, how i managed to change. The color was just to tint that and also i've loaded in a color map as well. But that's all we need for this right now, i'm going to take these textures and put them into a hair strand design on a second. So i'm just going to search for that folder. So this is the latest one here, as you can see, there's a whole lot of older versions of hair strand designer that's been developed over the course of a year and a half okay. So some of the new features here uh make it much more usable than before. So what i want to do is load in a uv image. I'M just going to click this icon down here and if i search for my downloads and look for any one of these textures, i guess the opacity is probably a good one to use okay, so you see how this has been laid out very old school. I'M just going to bring the strands down to zero, so we can see that so i have a heavy bunch uh a little bit of gaps here and there and i don't think i use them all in the end, but i'll, try and mimic what i see Here as best as possible, so i'm just going to increase the number of strands uh. Let'S say for set one i'll do quite a lot of strands, i'm going to put it on medium mode, just to see a bit more detail, and i want to make it really thin. So the thin range i'm going to make one and maybe three or four. Okay, four is good and i'll make the root and tip a bit thinner. Maybe the root can be a little bit on the thicker side. Okay, let's just check it out in slow mode. It looks fine. I can change the opacity of the uv image here now. It'S just a little bit slow and slow mode, so i'll put in fast mode again i can use the mouse wheel up to increase the number of strands that i see and i think i'm going to change the colors a bit i'll make the background completely black. So i'll bring the value right down, make it easier to see. Let'S change these to colors that i can at least read for now, you'll find that using hair strand designer you have to hold the button down a little bit longer than normal. If you've got a machine like mine which needs updated, okay, just some crazy colors just now, so i want to position each set. So i can just use the use the distancing to get them quite close, but if not because i'm on set one, i can actually just move it manually here, like this click on set to now set three and i think i'll. Let them share space because that'll give it a bit more variation set. Four. Is that one set five? Let'S do five and six sharing make it a little bit busier and we've got room for another couple. So eight i'm just going to move set nine right over to where set one is to help it out. Ten and 11 looks like it's just a single strand, so i can click in here and make it one. You see that changed everything there, because it's uh still got a few teething problems, just click off that and just bring those back up again. Okay, i think using the slider is the best way right now. Some of the text boxes haven't been looked at in detail, but everything's usable okay. So i'm going back to set one and change the spacing a bit and number of strands is 70. That'S probably enough! If i do mouse wheel up, i can get more detail with control, but without control i can see more strands as a preview. Let'S do the second set here, so this one we're at 445 strands to be generated, as it says down the bottom here. So that's not too bad! Keep that fairly within reason. There um, let's hover over these, to see which number that is number eight i'm going to move this over a bit and maybe number 11 just needs to move slightly to match that one, a bit better. Okay, that should be enough for a test. There might be gaps here and there, but let's just give it a color pass test. So click on color map - let's put it in fast mode, just to get a little bit more optimization from it and i'm going to click generate another thing: you'll notice, the the length of the strands is a bit different, so i'm gon na adjust that okay, i'm Just gon na preview, how that looks yeah it looks pretty funky some waviness in there as well we're using the multi-strand mode, which is now the default, because we get some really nice uh individual hairs down here and they can appear up and things like that, and I think it adds a bit more variety, so a couple of things i'm going to do after looking at that is i'm going to increase the variation a little bit just to give them a bit more, a change in scale and things and i'll change the length Just to the point where they meet the bottom now, let's put it on slow mode to see how that all looks, and i think that looks fine i'll go ahead and generate again. Okay, so we've got an ao pass here. This is a slightly new ao algorithm for the multi-strand mode, so i'm just gon na blow that a tiny bit we've got a depth map, color map mask map and our normal map normal map. I'M going to blow that a tiny bit as we also just want a little click on the blur. You can click it for longer and it will blur it even more, but one tiny more bit and quite happy with that. So i'm just going to export hst october 25. V2. Okay, so it's done all that and it still kept the textures intact as well. So everything should be good. If i was to come back and process more images more passes, it should look the same. Let me know if it's not. This is very early release, so uh, let's check this out, so i'm going to close - and i can always test these things as well, so i'm going to go back to the tool bag here and, let's just load up our version. Two: let's see what the alpha looks like. Is it different? Okay, it looks the same. That'S good going normal map version two and i guess spec map. I could grab the depth play around with those and i do have an ambient closure map as well. So closing, and this one it was a little bit darker - you may want to play around with that - those values: okay, so specular intensity for now um, but we don't have any anisotropic setup. So if you change lamborghini to um subsurface scatter for one, you will get a little bit of subsurface with thin heels, not as much as maybe skin or something because it's not as dense um, but you'll get a little bit. We can change this reflection to anisotropic and that will give us the anisotropic hair binding we need now. We'Ve got an optional directional map. Now i never generated one. At least i don't think i did so. Let'S go back and generate that so i'll just kick up and click open, hair strand designer from the tool that made it that's game maker studio by the way and i'm just going to load in that file that v2 file okay. So we get everything the same. Even the maps that i chose to render i'm just going to put on fast mode - and all i want really is the other map on the fris map and the flow map. Actually, so these two will be good and generate those okay. Now i can export them individually or i can export the this way that exports the file and these so i'll just call this um 25 extras just in case there's any discrepancies which i hope there isn't okay. So i've got my two flashes there for the maps. Just waiting this message disappearing: there we go so that's them saved i'll. Just come out with this now back into tow bag and i'm going to load in the flow map, you can choose to swap directions and things like that here as well. I think this is the right direction. I think let's have a look at the other map that i loaded that was uh, that we can use a secondary reflection. Let'S do anisotropic again and i guess i could put an anything here, i'm going to put in the frizz map just to see what i get you see. I got a nice little bit of frizziness, so just kind of throws it around. This gives me for something extra bit of a differentiation: okay, i'm not too happy with the color, so i could tint it here, but it still looks a little bit like straw here. I guess the hairs aren't dense enough around the normal map, see what i get with them without it try putting the fresh map and yeah yeah, that's not quite as good as it. Okay bring that back. I think we may have a crash. Yeah crashed out tried to undo the texture being re-chosen and i guess that didn't like that very much. So, let's load that up again and import model. Let'S just uh, go to the mesh and turn off callback faces and can start to load in the textures. Again. Now i want to jump back to gamemaker and hair strand designer for a second just to make a different color of the hair. So i can just load in one of those files, so i can load in the the extras one, which was the latest and play with the colors a bit. I don't want these. I just want the color map. I just want to make one colors quite nice. So go for a dark, brownish backdrop, variation tone. Let me just click that so that i can pick it and this one. I can pick that so i'll make it a little bit brighter root tone. I'M just gon na make that black and the tip tone i'll pick that color there and make it a bit brighter. Let'S change some coverage and things i'm going to put it on to slow mode, so i can see more strands. I think that looks a lot better okay, so i'm just going to export the color map, so i'll just generate, and it will just generate that one okay and i'm just going to export that single image, and this will be extras color. I guess i could save this over the extras file: okay, i'm going to exit, get that done and then back in here and then load in the color map. This would be a better color for that and then the alpha change this to the red channel and a gloss map. Of course we can make as friends specular we can make as depth. You can also experiment with either of those to see which one you prefer. I think that looks nicer being brown uh. This here could have been layered up much more. To be honest, this is an old old, very first version of here that i did and i have missed a lot of get uh places where there'd be more fly away. Here'S, but it's really just a demo to show you what's possible, all right, so, let's load and just make sure we've got the right normal map. We'Ve got the gloss map there. That'S we use threads for that. The alpha map. Let'S add the occlusion map. Okay, i'm going to change some things so sub surface scatter. We can play around some of that. It'S nice to see it kind of warms up somewhere, but it does kill the normal map a little bit. So good idea to be careful with that and i'd actually have a scatter map right like that, i guess i could bring in the frizz as a fuzz map and then reduce that a bit i'm going to change this to anisotropic. Let'S just add a light to actually see what's happening here do and then the flow map doesn't improve things that much to be honest because it doesn't uh. It doesn't deviate enough going in a straight direction. Let'S look a little bit plasticky here, so i'm just going to add a secondary reflection and we can do the same thing again or we can go for a mirror. I think it's just a little too glossy that it's looking a bit plasticish. I think something like that works now, i'm just going to duplicate the mesh, just move it a little bit just to get that idea of it being a little bit more busy and scale it down a bit yeah that just helps make it look a little bit More layered, but ideally you would layer things up anyway. Let'S add another light and light this way, directional light. Okay, i'm just going to darken the background, so we can see that a bit better and i'll put the directional light under the sky so that when i rotate it also rotates now i can play with the settings even more. You can see how that really affects things. I think it looks pretty decent for our first attempt at making hair and using something that makes the textures a lot easier to make uh some things i could take away from this is i could get away with more finer hairs and some things i need to Watch is to cut through of different textures, because you get a straight line from it, but you can have a go at making your own textures and things like that and see how how you feel about using uh this workflow, you see, i can make some nice Tints to the hair as well also, this works quite nicely in shaders, i've created an unreal engine and for unity, unreal engine, one's called stylized, hair shader, and that will use the rgb mask that that hair strand designer generates. So it gives you even more customization of the root and tip tones and for unity. It'S hair shader two. It also works in hdrp and it looks quite nice. It'S part of the human shader pack with us skin and other things other shaders eyes and yeah. Pretty cool, so i hope you enjoyed watching this video. I hope you enjoy using hair strand designer sorry about the little hitches back there, but i will do my best to make better videos in the future. This is the first of many thanks for watching bye.