Pages - Hair Material Process
Development and process screenshots of a hair material created for "Pages." I initially modeled the characters with hair meshes, but this proved problematic for Seet in particular. To get her long, flowing hair to have the desired quality, I felt cards would be the preferable modeling approach, but I had to figure out how to get the desired stylized look for both characters, and how to translate Jordan's shorter, chunkier design into cards.
The card modeling process is largely the same as normal hair cards. However, to avoid the stylized shapes becoming distorted, I ignored tapering the haircards as they approach the ends, in many cases actually widening them instead. The material generation is a combination of techniques I researched on realistic hair and stylized fur generation.
Jordan's hair material in Unreal Engine 4
Seet's hair material in Unreal Engine 4. A depth fade is also being applied on her material instance.
Substance Designer Hair Tile Generator. There are two versions, for creating large and small type tiles. The graph accepts any shape as an input. Jordan's hair material uses circles, while Seet's uses squares.
Tiles are stacked together using transforms and high blends to create cards
Each card is then scaled and positioned.
Additional masking
Generation of the Diffuse map. Output from substance includes: Diffuse (RGB), Normals (RGB), and Specular Mask(R)/Roughness (G)/Ambient Occlusion(B)/Opacity Mask (A)
Material is then fine tuned in Unreal. This is combined with an anisotropic highlight generator created by MizuGames (https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/free-hair-material/24782), as well as an optional depth fade overlay.