Principled Hair

I was writing up an issue/todo for principled hair, and then thought what the hell why not give it a whack. Took a couple of hours to dig up some papers and review what other folks were doing with path tracing.

First stop was implementing a quick biologically based hair color system. After all I thought instead of palettes let end users suffer with sliders using names from medical texts!

I mean… experiment and explore… yeah that’s the ticket.

How it started vs How it's going

Right now you can drive all possible hair colors with melanin and pheomelanin ratio, and tint color for ‘dyed’ hair. This will make character creation more fun and free form as well as allowing more player choice.

I’ll add a real light model later, but just wanted the realistic hair colors for now. I will do some real hair meshes or even strands at some point. This is a toe in the water for doing biology based skin tones next.

References

A Practical and Controllable Hair and Fur Model for Production Path Tracing

web | pdf

The current goto paper on this subject, and check its references for more info.

Blender: Principled Hair

web

I really liked how blender’s doc was done and how the shadernode is driven by the artist. It’s worth taking a look.

Image-Based Placement New Website