Plugins + Scripts [Experimental] AlternativeHairPhysics

So this was originally intended to replace VAM's hair physics, but I ended up starting with a new renderer and figured the community might want to play with it.

It's far from a finished product - basically just a tech demo, but I thought it was pretty cool.

The original intent was to improve hair smoothness through sub-division, but that exploded the polygon count and tanked performance. So instead we draw simple flat cards based on VAM's hair geometry and a custom fragment shader does...

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bobdandy said:

if this can fix vam hair issue when scaling person will be god tier

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lblg said:

If a character's hair preset includes 7 hair items, do I need to configure and save each one individually, and then reload them all?It seems like the settings reset when I switch to the next hair in the hair group.Thank you as always for such an awesome plugin!

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I've built a new render mode - Compute. Impostor rendered hairs on a bunch of transparent 'cards', which VAM rasterized pixel by pixel even though they were mostly transparent. Compute instead has one card, which is rasterized manually.

The end result is a huge improvement in FPS - better than stock VAM hair even at max settings (at least for me). The downside is bugs. Lots of bugs.

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I managed to increase the size of the k-buffer - allowing for better anti-aliasing. I also added an Analytic Coverage toggle, which makes the AA cheaper.

The end result is better-looking hair for more or less the same performance

Before
View attachment 618260

After
View attachment 618261

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Stopper said:

Stopper updated [Experimental] AlternativeHairPhysics with a new update entry:

Improved AA



Read the rest of this update entry...

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rabbit1qaz said:

So the physic is now applied to "card" instead of single hair? will it add better lightning speculars? now hair specular only work on "outside" of hairs and the hairs that are viewable but from inner place(eg near neck for front view) are dull and boring like light do not go there.

Ok, so ive tested it and when i choose Compute as render it do not show hair at all (one hair only on atom) if i choose Impostor, hair occur but look terrible( all setting default as plugin sugest, my CPU go 100% and coolers work as helicopters ( normaly i work with around 8pieces of hairs on 64/32 curve/density and cooler work normaly so it seem that there is some problems with FPS which it should go higher rather than lower ;D

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Renevel said:

Is this meant to work in VR?
I added the plugin to a person atom and my headset (Dream Air) started to lag, I dropped to maybe 10fps, and one screen (right eye) started flickering. I removed the plugin and everything went back to normal.

Maybe someone else has used this plugin successfully in VR, and it's just some issue on my end?

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• I tore out the Impostor render mode. It's Compute-only now as that seems to be the better long-term bet
• Tweaks to the k-buffer that should result in significantly better performance at K=4 (default)
• Immediately ate into the perf improvement with some occlusion fixes, but should still be a net win
• Added sliders for tip curl, which is meant to break up the unnatural smoothness of the hair

View attachment 618595

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I've revamped how spread and alignment works. The various spread sliders were removed. There are now four primary controls:

• Root and tip radius - the spread at the root/tip
• Root and tip skin alignment - how much the root/tip follows the skin

Before, sub-hairs were always rendered radially outward from the main simulated hair strand. This meant that hair that flat against the skin (left) would render like macaroni that didn't follow the skin at all(middle). Now you can...

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