About that in-game fur...

Yesss... progress!! \^0^/

So after my previous post about in-game fur techniques, I got a tip from a friend of mine about fur in Shadow of the Colossus:

Also, on the Smash Bros web site, I came across some pics of King Dedede. Check out the white rim of his coat!

..Another shell technique..?

Based on this info, I decided to see if this type of shell technique was done through code or attached to the model through some sort of extruded plane technique. I went to the models-resource.com and got both Sonic's Werehog model from Sonic Unleashed (the 360 version) and Silver the Hedgehog's model from Sonic Generations. The results were interesting...

Huh? where's the fur!?

Yeah, that fur!

No shells? Yup, coded.

This fur technique was probably coded on. I have actually found a very informative demo demonstrating this fur technique that's complete with downloadable source code: http://www.xbdev.net/directx3dx/specialX/Fur/
Aparrently this demo is designed for people to edit the features using the arrow keys and such but I don't know what I have to open it in to do that. I'll keep looking into this technique, but if you can figure it out, let me know!

So far, it seems I'll have a better chance of getting this technique to work in Unity than UDK.

Now, with Silver it's a different story...

For an in-game reference, here he is!

Huh? What are these?

Eight diffuse maps and one spec map?

Each one of these diffuse maps seems to be fainter than the one before it...

Well now, here's what I was looking for!

So what they do here is create an overlaying mesh of how thick the fur is going to be off the character's body then duplicate the faces and scale them down seven times from that. Then, each one is assigned a version of the fur at a different opacity, all with alpha enabled. This basically emulates the coded fur but on a more primitive level.

On the Shadow of the Colossus model you can see that they use this method combined with cards to make some pretty darn convincing fur!

I wanna run a test of this technique in UDK when I'm not as busy with school work. Who knows, maybe I'll make a hoodie with a fur trim for the character project!

I'm also gonna ask and see if a fur effect like the coded one could be done in Kismet. It's quite a long shot, but it's worth a try!

I'll see ya real soon!
(Awesome tango music be here!)