Epic knows that the market for grooming tools is not that large and rather than dominate that space, the team is keen to work with a range of companies such as Peregrine Labs and their Yeti software. It might be reasonable to think that Shave and a Haircut would now be a key part of the UE4 solution, but this is not the case.
These are free for everyone to use under the Unreal Engine 4 EULA. Since acquiring Shave and a Haircut, Epic Games has made it’s v9.6 Maya plugin and associated shaders available on GitHub as both source code and compiled binaries. Perhaps surprisingly, the new Epic hair tools that the company is shipping with UE4.24 do not involve that software at all. Recently Epic Games bought ‘Shave and a Haircut’, from Joe Alter (who also joined Epic in Nov. At the time of its release, Hairworks was helpful, but it was very much a black box and somewhat difficult to manipulate. Hairworks is no longer supported by the newer UE4 releases. The HairWorks toolset consists of DCC tool integration and real-time rendering and simulation for hair.
Some 5 years ago, NVIDIA had provided a hair solution called HairWorks. By rendering each individual hair, artists can massively improve the visual fidelity of real-time simulated hair. Using the new Hair Rendering and Simulation features in UE4.24, there is now the ability to render each individual strand of hair. In a card-based workflow, a small number of large flat sheets are used to give the approximate shape and motion of a much larger number of individual hairs.
Traditionally hair in real-time has been created using card-based rendering or other approximations. While Charles de Rousiers has been quite modest about this leap in real-time performance, after examining the new system, we agree with Morand’s statement that what, “Charles and the team have implemented is pretty spectacular.” The Groom uses full geometry in the new system As an experienced artist, she has been impressed at how quickly the new system has been developed and how much this experimental early release can do. We sat down also with Gaelle Morand, who is a Senior Technical Artist at Epic Games and formerly a Grooming Supervisor doing Look Development & Lighting at Industrial Light & Magic for 5 years in San Francisco.
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