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Realistic hair and fur with Unreal Engine: get the white paper!

April 27, 2021
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Producing realistic-looking hair and fur for computer graphics has long been a challenge for artists. In our new white paper Grooming for real-time realism: hair and fur with Unreal Engine, we describe how you can use Unreal Engine to generate real-time hair and fur for your own projects.

The particular shine of hair or fur, instantly recognizable by any viewer, can’t be faked with solid models—you need to replicate those thousands of strands and their unique translucent and reflective properties to make it look right. And then there’s the rendering process, which can take a long time.
Recently, Epic Games unveiled a system for rendering realistic-looking hair and fur in real time. In Grooming for real-time realism, we describe how the system implements advances in hair and fur rendering to make this process work faster than ever. 

The white paper explores two use cases: human hair as seen in our MetaHuman Creator announcement video, and fur and feathers from the Meerkat video created by Weta Digital. For both cases, we take an in-depth look at the grooming process including various workflows, best practices, styling and mapping techniques, and much more. Additionally, both the Meerkat demo scene and MetaHumans examples are available as free downloads, so you can see the techniques in action right away.

    Grooming for real-time realism

    Download the white paper and get started with the exciting world of real-time hair and fur.

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