Hair Shader

The Hair shader is a dedicated shader for rendering hair and fur, imparting different color, stranding, and animation effects. Hair rendering is a relatively difficult task to achieve in real-time with high-quality results due to the very fine geometry and specific lighting behavior. Depending on the hairstyle, either a simple scalp plane or a more complex shape that defines the volume of the hairstyle is needed. In some cases, breaking up a hairstyle into multiple large patches makes more sense.

Shader Parameters

Alpha Blend Multiplier
Multiplies the alpha map with the result that grayscale values are increased. Useful for the Thin Hair shader generation parameter.
Default value: 1

Diffuse Wrap
Allows light to pass through the hair, thus illuminating a wider area.
A tightly woven braid would have a lower Diffuse Wrap value (the hair being very dense), whereas sparse, loose hair would have a high Diffuse Wrap value.
Default value: 0.5

Indirect bounce color
Sets the amount of indirectly bounced color.
Default value: 136,136,136

Secondary Color
Sets color and intensity of the secondary specular highlight.
Primary highlight color depends on the diffuse color, whereas the secondary highlight usually has a more neutral color.
Default value: 217,217,217

Secondary Shift
Allows the secondary highlight to be shifted over the surface of the hair mesh. Make sure it works with the primary highlight, the position of which can’t be shifted.
Default value: 0.1

Secondary Width
Sets the width of the secondary specular highlight.
Default value: 1.5

Shift Variation
Adds variation to the shift of the secondary highlight.
Default value: 0

Soft Intersection
Controls the alpha blending of the hair against skin or scalp.
Default value: 0

Strand Width
Controls the width of the view aligned hair strands. The mesh you exported utilizing this feature from DCC tools is rather thin. The value functions as a multiplier relative to the meshes V coordinate (width) in UV space, which can be used to control strand thickness. For example, you might want thinner strands around the border areas.
This parameter requires that the View aligned strands shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 0.01

Thin Hair Threshold
Determines how alpha blending works for screen space effects such as DOF and motion blur. Lower values make the blending harder but can cause artifacts. Higher values soften the blending, but in some cases the hair turns into a blurry mess.
For most gameplay situations, the rather low default value works fine, but in cinematics, manual tweaking might be needed. The value must then be animated throughout the scene.
This parameter requires that the Thin Hair shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 0.05

Wind frequency
Sets the speed at which the vertices are deformed.
This parameter requires that the Wind bending shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 0

Wind phase
Sets hair animation phase and randomizes the deformation.
This parameter requires that the Wind bending shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 1

Wind wave0 amp
Sets the amount or amplitude at which the vertices are deformed.
This parameter requires that the Wind bending shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 0

Wind wave2 amp
Sets the amount or amplitude at which the vertices are deformed on a different curve.
This parameter requires that the Wind bending shader generation parameter is enabled.
Default value: 0

Shader Generation Parameters

Vertex Colors
Enables vertex colors.

View Aligned Strands
Enables the hair strands to self-align to the camera.
Because this is a global setting for the material, using view-aligned strands requires an extra draw call. For more information, see the Strand Width shader parameter.

Thin Hair
For information, see the Thin Hair Threshold shader parameter.

Ambient Cubemap
Enables the use of the nearest cube map specified in environment map slot for ambient lighting. Leave this enabled.

Enforce Tiled Shading
Forces hair to be fully affected by tile shading. This effect works as an override for the global tiled shading settings.
With tiled shading off, improper lighting of a scene can cause hair to turn very dark.
Use this effect carefully, as tiled shading for hair is generally quite expensive.

Wind bending
Simulates wind effects. If enabled, various frequency, phase, and amplitude wind options appear under Shader Parameters.