Fur shaders

White_Lion

Hi Odes,

So far the character creator looks to be pretty awesome but one thing that I'm not seeing that I *really* that you implement is a fur shader like you have in YL1. The fluff wasn't intended to replace fur shaders was it? Many of the YL2 characters I'm seeing seem to be using it as a stand in and it looks kinda funny when used like that to be honest.

Craket

Fur shader will be missed if it wont come back, But I went and revisited YL1 to see how good the Fur Shader actually is. And honestly, I think Fluff can replace it, simply because it is much easier to shape the character up with. It all depends on how well people use it and make with it.

for instance, my best fluffed character as of writting this is this guy:

Some factors that play into it is:

-The fuzzy fur texture all over his body to help give the assumption of fur.

-Fluff layering over eachother to stick out in different parts of the body for density.

The fur shader is actually just linear. For example, the Fur in CAT(yl1)s nose is also affected by the fur shader.

WOLF(yl1) has bumps in his model that simulate different levels of fur. With fluff, you dont (for the most part) need it because you can shape the fluff to fill up where there would be more fluff.

Basically what im saying is, Fur shader is not what best bought you the illusion of fur. Its the character model and texture. The shader simply helped those things feel better. With fluff, fur is more universal and can be applied to any character in "Realistic" areas. A dog would have more fluff than a Horse, but a horse would have selective fluff in specific areas. Between the two, there wouldnt be much of a drastic difference if they both only use fluff. But if one uses fur shader, it can clash with fluff aesthetics.

I 100% believe that fluff can replace Fur shader, it just has to be used better and better. But I dont really know if they opted fur shader out of their plans. Imo, I dont need it.

odes

It's very likely that a customizable fur rendering tech will be added at some point.

Craket

/|  *o*  |\

I wonder how it will work then, and the amount of characters that I will have to update is going to be huge by that time :O

odes

@Craket
I mean, both techniques (finns or shells) work fine. They're just different approaches that give different looks, with the finn one (the current one) looking more stylized. I don't think you'll have to update anything, but if you wanna do new versions of older creations, you can of course do that.

The way fur would work would be similar to fluff, where you sculpt tilt, direction and possibly curving too. You'd also be able to sculpt length of the fur, or remove it completely. Plus some extra settings to define the look and feel of the fur in general (shader settings).

odes

I couldn't contain myself, so I started experimenting with this fur shader. It's using more modern techniques to render much, much faster than in Yiffalicious:





As you can see in the video linked here, increasing the amount of shells hardly affects performance at all.
https://gyazo.com/5780e46d309356fc48185bf025977041

Been having some trouble with unity crashing after a while when using this shader though. Not sure what that's about.

Tourlist

@odes shader's looking great! Can't wait to have it in-game

Craket

@odes That is insanely good looking, and im relieved to hear those details about how we can play with it and the performance of it. What is even better is that this fur shader looks a lot like me going nuts with fluff. YL1 fur shader had a certain simple look to it, but this, I can actually make out each bit of fluff. Thanks for sharing!

Im definetly going to play around with it when its ready, to see how characters look with and without the shader, especially now that Ive only played without, and went to create an illusion that it has. A bit afraid that it will be the easy "Go to" option for a lot of people.

White_Lion

That does look awesome Odes! Is that hairworks or something else? Also releaved to know you were way ahead of us and already had it planned.

As much as I want to see YL2 get to the posing and animation stage can I suggest you try and implement fur prior to that stage? IMO it's a key character creation feature and as Craket said it would be a plain for people to try and use fluff then go back and switch to fur if that's the look they were going for. Apart from fur and the character cloud I can't think of any other major features missing on the character creation side. It might even clutter up the character cloud with "beta" version of characters although I'm not sure how much of a problem that would be.

odes

@White_Lion

Thanks!

No, it's a custom shader. I whipped it up just that moment. I had planned to do one at some point, but not so soon. Of course, more work still remains, as this is just the shader. There still needs to be tools for manipulating the fur and customizing it in different ways. But it's a start at least.

I agree releasing fur soon rather than later would make sense as we're working on the character creator now, and fur is probably something a lot of people want to play with. Cloud sharing has priority though, but after that I want to get going with fur authoring and customization asap.