Comprehensive 3D Hair and Beard Component-based Design for Any Hairstyle Imaginable.
The embedded Smart Hair system is designed to provide the most realistic, yet performance-friendly hair, brows, and beard for digital humans in games and films. The card-based hair meshes are intricate in detail, economical in texture resolution, and efficient for real-time rendering. The highly flexible color gradients and specular variations are powered by the Smart Hair shader. Design components allow you to freely assemble different custom hair and beard elements into unique hairstyles, while the beard and brows can dynamically conform to any facial movement.
A Plethora of Choices
Smart Hair’s component-based design offers an easy and effective way to manage 3D hair, brow and beard assets. Users can add select hair parts and accessories, combine elements into groupings, and compose them together to form a cohesive look. Group and Style items can be replaced with a single click to quickly test out different variations. Imported assets assigned to a corresponding facial area automatically conforms to the underlying surfaces . The beard is composed of mustache, goatee, sideburns, soul patch and other accessories. On the other hand, hair is divided into base, top, rear, bangs and accessory parts for optimal mixing. Use the component design system to alter character hairstyles with different fringes, bodies, and ponytails. You can also fill in tiny hair and wispy fuzz around the hairline and back of the neck.
Creating a multitude of natural hair looks is possible with four powerful controls: Ombré (root and end color), Balayage (highlight color), Base Layer (vertex color), and Reflection (flow map). With these potent effects you can easily create chic or stylized hair dye, create silky smooth hair reflections, simulate silver gray, or parched look and feel. Blend with vertex color (predefined in hair meshes) for enhanced depth effect. For natural layer contrast, you can use lighter vertex color on upper layer meshes, and darker vertex color for layers underneath. Create subtle gradual hair color fades using Root and End colors, usually from darker tones at the roots to a lighter tone towards the hair tips for a classic ombré style. The strand color pattern is defined by the grey-scale Root map, and supports different blend modes and strength controls. The Highlight Color effect is the highlighting done with hair dyes that we see in reality; Two highlight colors can be blended to create more natural looks, with the ID texture map controlling the effect. The natural reflections gives hair a healthy lifelike look and feel . One can adjust the Specular strength, alter the Reflection Flow, or disrupt the reflective pattern to emphasize unique hairstyles.
The Smart Hair system is designed for performance: the card based meshes are small in size, fast to load, and efficient for real-time animation. One complete hair set is merely hundreds or thousands of polygons, while using optimal texture sizes : hair at 2K and beard at 1K. By utilizing minimal resources you can achieve high visual realism with sophisticated coloring, and adjustable reflections using the real-time shader.
The Smart Hair Beard and Brows can perfectly conform to animated facial surfaces during real-time performance. It works in real-time for facial morphs, lip-sync animations, facial motion capture, and intensive expression change with the Face Puppet tool. One can also fine-tune the shape and position of the facial hairs with the Mesh Editor. To top it all off, facial hairs are exportable, at any stage, as FBX blend-shapes for game engines and 3D rendering.
Reallusion’s Smart Hair system is compatible with major 3D hair creators like Ornatrix (for Maya, C4d, Ma, ...), XGen, and Blender hair plugins – as long as they can export card based hair meshes in OBJ or FBX format, and generate the texture maps needed for the shader effects. You can convert existing hair assets as Smart Hair components, or upgrade the rendering with the Smart Hair shader by adding required effect maps. Smart Hair supports direct shader compatibility with Unreal Engine; with one-click you can transfer hair assets through the Auto Setup plugin, while keeping the identical feature adjustments consistent between the two programs. For Unity and other 3D tools, you can choose to bake shader effects to PBR textures for rendering.
Smart Hair’s beard and brow elements are designed to move along with their corresponding facial vertices – however when bringing in new items which have vertices detached from the facial surface, users can use the Vertex Assignment tool to define the target following area to avoid mesh stretches, or mesh penetration, when animating the face.
For more information, visit the Smart Hair landing page.
