Advanced Hair shading

Hello Patrons!

Here I'd like to show you my latest creation in real time character rendering*. Skin and Hair shading is very important to me since nice looking men deserve good looking hair too ;)

Creating blonde hair types is pretty difficult since blonde hair unlike other colors have a very specific way how the light gets reflected and refracted at the same time.

Did you know? In video games the hair of the character model used to have a "painted" look since it is too extensive to have real time ray tracing effects to calculate complex materials such as indirect environment reflections. Without going too much into detail about this topic since it's very "heavy" and complex I'll skip that point. ^^ Of course the video game industry have their own ways to make it possible that everything looks fine within the game.

Once you work on the model outside of the game there's a lot of stuff to do until you reach a certain level of detail. For this example image above I used to do a lot of research how human hair interact with real world lighting conditions and brought that over to the render engine I use. 

Depending on the environment lighting the shader of this hair material which I made for Arthur exclusively changes it's color behavior pretty much with the influence of indirect lighting reflections and strength.

The image above was created using a virtual studio light very similar to closed "rooms" with white walls and a open window where the afternoon sunlight shines into it. As you can see his hair and beard shade looks quite "brunette" by default - just like real hair does.

However if we change the environment to an outdoor midday direct sunlight the shade changes drastically.

As you can see the hair material looks a lot more "reflective" than it was with the darker environment. In my opinion this kind of reflectivity is more suitable for Women's hair which had been styled nicely by an hair stylist so this doesn't look very good on Arthur since he's more the "rough cowboy" from the wild wacky west and this got me back to work again.

After even more testing with different values for specularity and refraction I found a good result for him which looks much more natural for his type of hair. However the clearcoat on the outer surface started to produce some grain as you can see in the image below.

Denoising didn't helped either and I was very concerned if this material type I've build up so far was suitable for this job at all... At this day I gave it a rest and went to sleep. After an nearly sleepless night I went back to the project resulting me into creating some new textures and changing some of the properties in the render pipeline.

I let the test image render for a while until something unaware occurred: The noise from the outer layer of clearcoat changed it's position from the outside to the inside of the model which looked super awful... At this point I was really about to stomp this project but I didn't gave up - I wanted a blonde hair material so I worked until I got the results which I liked.

Ladies (if anyone here on my patreon is a girl ^^) and gentlemen let me show you:

Blonde Advanced Hair Shader V.II - Finally all the work had been paid off! The shader turned out better than expected and the best part about this is that the quality increases if the used character model has better hair assets. So the future with this material will be brighter than ever before! (no pun intended xD)

Alright folks I hope you enjoyed my little journey I had so far and if you have any question droooop a comment below. ;)

*all images shown here are real time captured from the render engine - no post processing.

Have a nice day!

~F0