Check out real-time hair creation tool Fiber Shop 2
Originally posted on 11 January 2021. Scroll down for news of the Fiber Shop 2 update.
Games artist Moslem Tavakol has released Fiber Shop, a new standalone tool that simplifies the process of creating geometry-based hair for use in games and real-time work.
It enables users to create sheets of strand-based hair, then convert them to 3D hair cards that can be exported to other applications in FBX format, or baked to 2D hair card textures.
Generate 2D or 3D hair cards for use in games and real-time work
Like Maya add-on Coiffure, Fiber Shop streamlines the process of converting strand-based hair to faster-rendering geometry-based hair, baking out sets of strands as textures and applying the textures to cards.
Users can generate flat arrays of hair strands, adjusting their form via sets of parameters to adjust scattering, bending, curl, noise and clumping.
The strands can then be coloured via a layer-based tinting system.
Changes are displayed in real time in the software’s viewport, which supports PBR textures and image-based lighting, with users able to move the position of lights interactively.
Completed sheets of hair can be baked to textures – the software exports 10 common texture passes, including geometry-based ambient occlusion – at resolutions up to 4,096 x 4,096px, with alpha channels.
Users can customise the arrangement of the individual hair card textures in UV space.
Alternatively, 3D hair can be exported to game engines or other DCC applications in FBX format, either as strands – the direction and ID passes are exported as vertex colour data – or 3D cards.
Updated 8 February 2022: Fiber Shop 2 is out. The update introduces new workflows for drawing the forms of strands of hair by hand, as shown in the video above.
Version 2.0 actually shipped in December 2021 and added support for live layout in the design viewport, and a new hand drawing mode and Length Curve in the Scatter modifier.
Version 2.2, the most recent update, adds a new auto-save system.
In addition, since we originally wrote about Fiber Shop, Moslem Tavakol has made the formerly subscription-only software available as perpetual licences, including “free lifetime updates”.
Pricing and system requirements
Fiber Shop 2 is available for 64-bit Windows only.
Indie subscriptions, available to artists earning under $100,000/year, cost $39.90/year. Indie perpetual licences are currently available at a 50% discount, and cost $119.90.
Studio subscriptions cost $99.90/year; Studio perpetual licences currently cost $299.90.
If you want to try before you buy, there is a non-commercial free version of the software which restricts the number and resolution of texture maps that you can export.