Substance Painter Hair with Opacity/Transparency Map

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xBMcnx2Kkk

 

This looks a lot better if you have lots of layers of hair. The tips of the groups on top will look like there are semi-transparent strands, the bottom layers will be more opaque. Also, paint the scalp the color of the hair to give the illusion of density.

 

Adjust the UVs according to whether you want the hair to taper or spread. Use the checkers as reference.

Set up the hair as rectangular UVs (planes) if you want the strands to taper to a tip.

Eyelashes don’t taper, they spread out.

 

Align the UVs vertically so all the hair flows in one direction.

 

Maya 3 smoothing can fix a lot of things, but to be safe, duplicate your Geo and Mesh: Smooth until it looks good on 1.

 

Export as obj into Substance Painter

 

Viewer Settings: Shader: (pbr metal rough with alpha shading)

 

When exporting you need to create a custom configuration from PBR SpecGloss from MetalRough and add Opacity map to the configuration.

In PBR SpecGloss from MetalRough click add Grayscale map. Name this Opacity.

Look for Opacity in the column to the right, drag and drop into your configuration, set add as Grayscale. It will export as a Grayscale map.

 

1. Fill layer: base color with some rough and metal

2. Texture: Duplicate the base color. Attach a black mask to the duplicate. Right click black mask add fill (at the bottom half).

3. Fill: grayscale box. Drag and drop fur3 from Procedural into grayscale. Change the fill color to see the effect.

4. Change to UV viewing mode to see how the hair lays out on your UVs.

5. Fur 3: Rotate UV 90 in fill.

6. UV Scale has two sliders. The one of the left scales the UV vertically, the one on the right scales it horizontally. The textures option box below also lets you change how spread out the strands are and how much variation in waviness. UV offset moves the image across your UVs, you might be able to find a better part of the image to use.

7. Scale the UVs vertically to create longer strands, and add a little bit of horizontal scaling to create a hairline/ part the strands toward the top of the head.

8. Clean up as much as possible

9. Duplicate texture layer and set a brighter color. This will be the alpha map

10. Add a tiny bit of height to the first texture layer but not the second one.

11. Alpha map: Add levels to the black mask.

12. Take the furthest left (black) slider and move to the right for variation in hair lighting.

13. TextureSet Settings: Channels: [+Opacity]

14. Alpha map: Turn off all Material attributes except opacity

15. Turn opacity to 0

16. Grayscale: invert on. You can add levels to this map and increase the intensity, but this is really sensitive so be careful.

17. You can also paint a custom Opacity map and include it with the one made from hair strands. Opacity denser closer to head Geo, more translucent towards the tips of the hair.

18. Make sure the hair has the roughness/metalness/height/color that you want before exporting. The opacity you’ll change in Arnold.

19. Export: Config. PBR SpecGloss from MetalRough (with the extra opacity map)

 

Arnold:

 

1. Aistandardsurface, name it accordingly

2. Diffuse goes into Basecolor

3. Glossiness goes into metalness and roughness, adjust according to how much Spec/metalness you want.

4. Specular goes into Specular Color

5. Height to displacement (lower the alpha gain a lot, you may need to put alpha offset to a very small negative value -.01 to -.2 work)

6. Normal to bump mapping (set to tangent space normals)

7. Grayscale Opacity to Opacity

8. For Opacity, select the all the hair Geo you want to the space between the strands to be transparent, in the attribute editor under Arnold, uncheck opaque. You can only do this one-by-one.

9. In the hypershade under opacity, highest exposure 5 will still make all of the hair too transparent, so type in a number to increase the maximum exposure. 6-10 work.

10. The spec will probably be too high. You can adjust these in metalness/roughness/Spec IOR. generally Exposure/Color gain/Alpha gain will have effect. Alpha offset may help but that changes your Alpha position.

11. By this point it should already look like pretty standard hair.

12. If you want to, subsurface would look good. Turn up the weight, set the Subsurface color (Diffuse/BaseColor) Radius color (Color of the strands when light shines through). Scale determines how far the light will have to penetrate before showing the subsurface color (1 is low subsurface like plastic, 2 is about skin or rubber).

13. Transmission makes all of the geo with this shader transparent. It’s really sensitive so it’s best to avoid this if possible.