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Hirokazu Yokohara, a renowned 3D Artist and Generalist widely known for creating jaw-dropping simulations and VFX using different software, has recently experimented with Unity's hair simulation system, introduced back in 2022 with the company's tech demo Enemies.
Based on Alembic Cache, the system allows the artist to create gorgeous hairstyle meshes with realistic behavior and tons of customizable parameters, including length and the number of individual hairs. Moreover, the system works with strand-based hair and is capable of operating in real-time.
Leveraging the framework, Hirokazu has managed to set up an impressive blonde hairstyle featuring bouncy physics that gives the coiffure its lifelike behavior. Although pleased with the outcome, Hirokazu expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of documentation on the system, noting that it feels like "no one has touched it properly" since its release in 2022.
"I can't find any information anywhere on the internet about Unity's strand-based hair," Hirokazu commented. "There is a theory that no one has touched it properly. After investigating the only sample file, I was finally able to get decent hair rendering.
The official tutorial only shows a simple way to load and shake the hair, so I copied the shader settings for the Enemies and enabled high-quality line rendering. There is really no explanation of shaders. There is no explanation at all about what to do with the hair material in the official documentation. Is Unity not interested in digital humans other than demos?"
Previously, the artist also demonstrated a stunning semi-real virtual avatar, a neat soft-body simulation created with UE5's Chaos Flesh system, a 2D-looking 3D animation inspired by 90s anime aesthetics, a real-time fur simulation made in UE5, a cool deepfake face made with Maya and DeepFace Live, a beautiful real-time red and blue fire and smoke FX, a delicious-looking cold rice sim, and a couple of neat smoke FX made in UE5 and Niagara.
Hirokazu also showed how to simulate clothes in Blender with mocap data, how to set up a realistic face with Maya and Ziva Face Trainer, and how to utilize Apple's RoomPlan for 3D environment modeling, experimented with soft body simulations in Cinema 4D, and turned a 2D image into a 3D mesh with Blender. You can check out all of these projects and more by visiting Hirokazu's Twitter page.
Earlier, Game Developer and VFX Artist Sakura Rabbit also tested out the capabilities of Unity's hair simulation system:
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