8 Techniques To Create Textures For Real-time Hair

These are the workflows to create textures for game-ready hair and to be used for hair models made of polygonal cards (strips).

Usually, we would need this set of textures for real-time hair: Alpha, Diffuse (optional, as sometimes the color can be applied directly in the game engine shader), Depth (or Height in another word), Unique ID and Root (or Gradient Ramp). Sometimes, it is also necessary to have Ambient Occlusion, Normal and Flow maps. Check with your Technical Artist or Game Programmer, which maps are needed in your case. You can also refer to my chart of the game textures example:

textures for the game ready hair

1. Hair&FurTG plugin for Substance Designer

Price: from $60+

This one is so far my favorite tool to create hair texture. It is procedural, allows to create clump presets and have a ton of parameters to help you design the hair strands.

The best thing is that you can get out of it every texture you could require. The whole set includes: Mask, Alpha, Depth, Color, Gradient Ramp, Id, Ambient Occlusion, Normal and Flow.

To use it, you have to be at least a bit familiar with the Substance Designer software. At the same time Olivier, the developer of HairTG tool has very detailed videos of how to use it, just reserve a few hours - six to be precise :) , to dive into it.

Though it took me some time to discover all the possibilities of this tool and yet, I believe there're more to discover, the tool is so powerful, you could create almost any design of hair texture. Check out the demo video here and the detailed description of the tool on Artstation store.

2. Baking Maya xGen hair stands with Arnold or XNormal

Check out the process video by Andrew Giovannini - he shows how to make hair textures in Maya's xGen, and how to bake Alpha, Height, Root and ID maps using xNormal.

3. Create hair texture with Fibermesh in ZBrush

This video by JD Styles shows the 3+ hours workflow of creating hair and eyebrow textures in Zbrush fibermesh. There's no narration in the video.

3. Create hair texture in Substance Designer

You can create your own simple hair generator In Substance designer as shown on this video. Though you won't have much control over the strands design, it is still a great and fast way to create simple textures.

4. Create hair texture in Substance Painter

This is a clever way to texture hair cards In Substance Painter by chang-gon shin. It is more useful for a stylized characters, in my opinion.

5. Hair Strand Designer Tool

Price: $12.50+

Standalone tool (for PC only), creates Alpha, Color, Normal Map, Depth Map, ID Map and Mask Map, also AO map and Flow map. It was designed for Hair Shader 2 (Unity) and Stylised Hair Shader (Unreal Engine), which is also available on the Artstation store.

6. Script for Maya Coiffure (Maya)

Price: $75+

It's a powerful tool to work with hair cards in Maya, offers 130 default strands in library for fast texture creation. You can also use it to bake hair caps.

7. Blender Hair Tool

Price: $40+

This tool is your best friend when creating card-based hair for games. You can create textures (for strands and hair caps) and automatically place and manage procedurally the hair cards. Check it's detailed documentation about creating textures in Blender and check out this video.

8. Fibershop tool

Price: Free demo and $30+

This is a standalone tool that creates Specular, Albedo, Ambient, Direction(flow), Translucency, Height(depth), Normal, ID, Alpha(opacity) and Root/tip maps. You can check out a free demo version here or buy the full package here.