Lets say you're making a character for Doom3. The character in question has long hair. How would you make the normal mapped hair? What would you use as a source to get the normal map from? I'm tired and I just can't get my mind around how to do this.

If it's long straight hair, I'd paint it, along the lines of Poopinmymouth's animated gif. Then I'd convert the color map into a grayscale heightmap, then Nvidia-filter it into a normal map.

If it's curly-wurly, then I'd do a different paint job, maybe with filters.

But for sure there'd be a lot of testing in-game, to see how bad the shader mangles it.

Thanks Eric. I'm so tired right now that I forgot about the photoshop plug-in. So basicly I could do it like alpha mapped hair, but with the added normalmap generated from the heightmap.

You're going to have to toy with the opactiy once you run the filter though...hair is quite fine, and depending on how high you have your opacity for the overlay of the painted/plugin generated normal map onto the original...you can run the gamut of having hair that looks like chunks of plastic, to hair that looks like hair... [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I don't think normalmapping it would be the best, I think just playing with an alpha mapped diffuse and a good specular map will make it...I'm working on hairdo aswell for my next doom3 character, would love to see if normalmapping hair is worht it though.

i wouldnt normal map hair at all ... ive never bump mapped any hair so i certainly wouldnt normal map it

Just wanted to say thanks for the advice guys. I'm not doing a model for Doom3 right now so the question is just acedemic. What can I say, I'm just a curious fellow.