Hair Tool Unity

Hair Tool Unity is an advanced system for generating and simulating hair and fur in Unity. It has a highly optimized compute shader for hair rendering and dynamics, and it includes an artist-friendly grooming solution with 8 different brushes (Length, Width, Rotate Root, Orient, Twist, Attract, Smooth, Reset, Mask Clumps). The system also supports Alembic grooming, making it easy to import hair and fur from third-party applications. It has hair shading based on the Marschner model and supports all three rendering pipelines. It has support for ribbons, alpha sorting, hair physics with gravity and wind, and color painting.

It is a fast and efficient way to render hair for games. It uses a simple but powerful technique called “hair cards”. Hair cards are layers of pixels that represent each section of a character’s hair. The pixels are sorted in back-to-front order from every viewing direction, and then each frame the rendered image is updated by drawing new rows of pixels for each card. The result is a fully dynamic and animated image. This technique has the advantage that it does not require as many CPU resources to draw, compared with a traditional image buffer approach.

The Hair Tool supports two types of hair shaders: Approximate and Physical. The Approximate shader produces a realistic effect, but it requires that you adjust nodes in the graph to match the lighting in your scene. The Physical shader, on the other hand, uses a more complex shading model to produce more physically accurate results.

It also offers a few additional features. You can enable tessellation for the shader graph by selecting Tessellation Options from the Options menu. This will improve performance, but may reduce visual fidelity for some hair models. You can also enable eye refraction, which will cause the eyes to use screen space refraction, rather than object space refraction, and thus be more visually accurate. Finally, you can enable the ‘Rebake Blender Unity Maps’ option which will cause the hair shader to re-bake the Flow Map Normals in order to improve lighting quality for some hair models.

Aside from that, the Hair Tool provides a small preview scene that you can open in Edit Mode to see how your animations and facial expressions will look on your character. The preview is displayed in an embedded window in the Scene View, and you can control it using an intuitive UI.