mathman opened this issue on Jun 05, 2004 ยท 41 posts
ronstuff posted Sun, 06 June 2004 at 2:27 AM
pdxjims has a point that some highly treated female hair like you see in the commercials and a lot of the overly postworked magazine ads has a metallic look to it, but most ordinary hair does not. I believe that the real factor in creating realistic hair (aside from bump mapping and good materials) is transluscency, which we have available in P5. If you plug your hair texture into the transluscency channel you will not need to "fake it" by multiplying the texture through the highlight which in real-life is indeed a "sheen" that has the color of the lighting and not the color of the hair - though in the virtual world we sometimes have to fake an effect due to rendering limitations - at least in P5 we don't have to do it as much ;-) The problem with applying the texture to the highlight (especially with darker textures) is that you will never be able to get the kind of sheen and natural highlights from your scene lighting that I have demonstrated above. It is fine if you have painted highlights in the texture map itself, but hardly realistic if one knows what to look for.