Real-Time Hair Tutorial  

2 years ago I decided to master real-time grooming. I watched every single video on youtube and bought many courses, but still there were many gaps in my knowledge and skill. Years of industry practice and lots of work did help me to sort out all my questions and find solutions to most common problems.

Real-time hair creation has broadened my prospects as a game character artist and helped to make my way to AAA games. So my main goal was to share my experience in real-time grooming and to help game artists in mastering it.

In this tutorial I will walk you through the whole pipeline to make a real-time hair. I have collected best tips and pieces of advice to make your studying comfortable and fulfilled. I can't teach you how to make things beautiful, but I can give you all tools and practical techniques to open  you the world of real-time grooming. 

This tutorial has 5 voiced main parts  (over 5 hours)

(1) Blockout Section

(2) Xgen Introduction and Modifiers

(3) Baking maps

(4) Placing haircards in 2 techniques

(5) Exporting and Rendering

(6) Extra part with video and tips material on  •Dreadlocks   •Braids   • Haircap

All parts include slides with shortcuts, tips and insights on industry standards.

I also include UE4.25 scene for render, Marmoset Bundle and 2 mannequins  which you can use for your purposes.

Some repetitive parts of videos are time lapsed and Extra part (6) of this tutorial is not voiced (but still has all slides describing main processes and tips)

I tried to make this tutorial suitable for complete beginners, so in voiced parts I describe every process, but still many basic things such as UI or software navigation are not covered in this tutorial.
In the 4-th part I show 2 ways of placing the cards. The first one doesn`t require any additional software or plugin, but if you want to use the second one, you would need to buy a plugin. Partly because of this reason I priced the tutorial a bit cheaper than I wanted to do in the beginning.

I use Zbrush, Maya 2018 and 2020 (doesn’t matter), Photoshop, Unreal Engine and Marmoset toolbag, but you might find this tutorial useful even if your software preferences differ. I tried to include as much practical industry info as I could.

Included in the ZIP files:

- 15GB of Files 

- 9 Video Tutorials

- 9 Presentation Files with Tips

- over 5 hours video tutorials split into 10 Videos

- Unreal  Engine Scene

- Marmoset Bundle

-  2 Mannequins + extra preset for braids

Wish you to have a nice grooming!

A few resources added + fixed link to baking materials. You can find all of these in a pdf file called Update&Fix