Bunnie Rabbot Rebuild - Dropping Placeholder Fur in Unreal for Shader Tuning
12After discovering a more efficient way to build hair cards I next needed to drag the temporary mesh made of them into unreal for some material tweaking. I will eventually two tone her fur by hand but the card laying is the hardest part. Now that that was done I could see that clearly alpha hair cards are way lighter than alembic curves and even with some world position offset going the FPS did not tank nearly as hard as it did with alembic fur. Also the biggest improvement is the backlighting and shadow softness. Something is still very wrong with how alembic fur renders in unreal. Up close no matter what settings you put the hair tubes got way too dark making every female animal character look like they have the worse 5 o'clock shadow. Sore wa NG yade! No good. Much better solution here.
For the UE5 hair shader, after exploring and giving up on ages old Paragon free assets, I stumbled across this artists Guang's gumroad and Art Station shader tool listings. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nEWWeX It was not so useful out of the box and because of a language barrier I had no idea how to use it but I made some edits to make it work a little better for my purposes. The sheen and softness look were a great refinement so building on to that with my own coloration and WPO tuning helped me get her fur to something reasonably decent looking.
Next is to test weather or not I can stick this back into CC4 and hope that if I assign it as a "beard" it can be snapped up by all of the facial rigging bones which by default in CC4 are uneditable and entirely inaccessible by the end user. Its one of their basic gotchas and a strong enough reason to stay far away from using it if know you want to do custom facial rigging stuff on non humanoid creatures without having your own hand made rigging and facial morphs already in place. I am not a rigger/animator so of course I am doing all of what I can with just out of the box assets which her present form is still technically a legit CC4 editable avatar state.
**Warning this is not by any means a walkthrough or guide. Lots of mistakes were made and I'm sure not the best solutions were used but the goal for today was just to get it working and look reasonably ok.
#CC4 #Reallusion #Bespoke #CreatureCharacters #CharacterDesign #SubstancePainter #BunnieRabbot #BunnieBot #SonicMovie #ArchieComics #SatAM
#lunarnewyear #chinesenewyear #yearoftherabbit #2023 #Character #Unreal #Sonic #Metaverse