HEY GUIZE (Patreon)

I HAVE SOME NEWS 

BAD NEWS

AND GOOD NEWS THAT WILL IMMEDIATELY MAKE THE BAD NEWS SEEM LIKE NOTHING

Okay, so.

I was working on a very nice piece with Adreea, and I wanted to try using the new hair that was still pretty much in beta in her case. Well, it turned out this new technique is quite useless for very long hair. Very limited, and has a huge, GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS, oversight OF GARGANTUAN PROPORTIONS in its design, which only became apparent after I attempted to use it practically. On long hair. With partings and all. I'm not going to bore you with technical details, but it basically was a huge mess that I could barely control, and it looked like utter shite.

And now the good news.

I put my hands on a 3rd party hair plugin, and spent yesterday's evening learning it. I just need some practice, but now I can do EVERYTHING I WANT, hair-wise. And not only hair-wise. I can also make feathers now. I can set up 100% customizable profiles for hairs, so I can have, for example, hourglass- shaped hairs, or normal hairs ending in a ball thingy, or bead-like hairs, or whatever the hell I want, so that makes it useful for plenty of things that aren't necessarily hair. I can have adaptive tessellation on hairs now, so I don't even need to figure out how many segments they need. I can MAKE FULL-BODY FUR AND SET UP ITS FLOW VERY EASILY (although that may be RAM-dangerous). I can have multi-colored hair now (in theory; haven't tried it yet; the last tech was supposed to allow that too, yet it didn't work at all, and I don't know why, so let's be sceptical for now). I can make FRICKIN AUTOMATED BRAIDS - THREE TYPES OF THEM EVEN. I can make GODDAMN TWO TYPES OF CURLS. I can HOLY SHIT I CAN MAKE HAIR PARTINGS AND THEY WILL WORK PROPERLY. I CAN MAKE JINJING-YU'S HAIR WITHOUT FEAR OF NOT SUCCEEDING CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT I THINK I WOULD BE ABLE TO TACKLE IT RIGHT NOW AND WIN WITHOUT MUCH EXPERIENCE HOLY SHIT JESUS STICKFIGURE

So yeah, I'm very excited about this, as you may have noticed. I don't have any examples to show yet, but I might have some soon. Gonna start slowly, and translate Kebibi's hair. That's the easiest.

HOWEVER. Not all is rainbows and happy foxes. This plugin uses MassFX for hair simulations, which may or may not prove to be a bit of a nuisance when I'll want to do some simulation-aided hair "posing", and most likely a huge nuisance when I'll want to make the hair collide with the world in the simulation or combing processes. Dunno how I'll tackle that, BUT I MUST. The other thing is that I'll have to use the VRayHairMtl shader (for some reason everyone can set it up to look great, but it always looks like jelly for me without some guerilla-style workarounds which won't work well anymore), which is what I've been using before switching to the beautiful new hair with its own, much prettier, built-in, unextractable shader. But because these latest ones will be actual hair objects, and not imported meshes, it should look decent at worst. I'll do my best to set it up right. Worst case scenario: I'll make a custom shader that'll look much better, but will render much slower.

Not gonna give up tho. Don't want to use any other hair tech now! :D

And congrats on reading all that! XD

SORRY I'M JUST VERY EXCITED I HOPE YOU ARE TOO NOW