 Hi, another hair video because some time ago, some weeks ago we got this awesome file from Nassar Njasko and it had some hair in this model that it would look just, to me it looked great actually everybody was pretty excited So I made a video and it was some time ago actually at the beginning of last month and I made a quick video just an image screen capture of it and it It actually got really popular people got really excited just as excited as me, but then Talking with the developers said like there's no real improvements in Evee's hair like it that's how it should look There are a few tweaks that were done, but it's not like the actual improvement to hair It just happened to look cool. So now there has been an actual improvements on hair drawing and The great thing is that it's not only for Evee But it's also for cycles in a way because the settings for hair are now shared And they are now part of Blender's DNA itself so cycles are it's going to use them and Evee also can use it and even other engines can use for example the width of the hair or different settings in this case Well, let's try how it looks on a simple model. I'm just adding hair. It's a very simple just hair particles in Evee, let's see how it looks and Let's see the issue that it had in before is that you will zoom in and no matter Which how far you are it will always have the same size But now you can enable from the hair settings you can enable set it instead of rendering a strand To render it to render it as a strip. So if you put a light here if you look at it actually when you zoom in the The hair gets wider so it keeps the the width and it has some sort of shading It's like a little tube. So it's similar to how cycles would render it if we switch to cycles now. It's It's pretty close game. I'm here. I'm blowing it out. But if I Let's make there you go. This is how Cycles these cycles just looks like this because it doesn't have sample bounces, but if you switch to Evee They're pretty close. Of course Evee doesn't do the actual geometry around like a tube Just to to make it more like faster. It's real time, right? But the drawing is actually pretty close so when you see it on an actual model you can tell the difference and Again with the model that we we got a time ago. Let's see how it looks. So the hair Looked pretty good I think but when you start looking into it like at the end especially on the tips You will find that it all you can see some strands being like a different size Some of them were like clamped and at the end it was always the same width, but now if you change this Setting here in the hair is in the render properties to a strip You will see that the hair now fades properly So you can actually zoom in you can see the individuals hair strands and You can go out and it's so much better, but not only that actually is that it's now Properly shaded. So if you add a plane Here let's put it in the back. Let's Let's take one of these lamps When I point it to the other Direction just want to have some shadows gonna remove these lamps and Let's make it a spot so if I Pointed in the right way without messing There you go, you can see now that the plane Actually the hairs are casting shadows. That's pretty nice Of course, if it's such a small size that you have to give it a bit of softness in order to get rid of that That noise ups and blender closed It's under development guys but Let's open it again The other thing that it's pretty great is that not now the shading also works with I'm the amin occlusion and with Contact shadows as I was showing and with the regular shadows as well so if I Enable or disable Here the shadows I'm in occlusion. It also shows up and You can go crazy and make the hair Reflective you can actually let's let's see if we can do it here So if you go to the settings of this shader, for example, and I disconnected and I add a new Principal Vstf I'll crash again Let's try again If it doesn't work, I'm gonna give up BAM here split the window go shift F3 and then Just Go to this Let's add a principal Vstf shader and it crashed Okay, I'm not gonna try it again But basically it means that you can make the hair reflective you can have and try to make it as reflective as possible If I don't add a new node and it's just played with this node. Let's make it so it's rough Metallic a hundred percent and as you can see here It's completely reflective and let's add a plane with like a material that it's Let's make it a color. That is there you go and we enabled the properties for Screen space reflections you can see the plane being reflected on the hair That's crazy So you can you can really go very experimental with this and try your own your own setting for the hair But it's a great step forward now that blender itself has its own DNA for settings for hair So cycles can use it if you can use it they can share the settings So no matter which engine you use you just set the hair type once how it looks once and then each engine will have its own but Yeah, I think it's a it's a great improvement and this is not related to the improvements that I'll call me eventually which are the hair shaders project in the school summit of code, but That is that is a great improvement another setting that I Shouldn't leave without commenting about is a subdivision Setting on the hair itself so the hair you can you can when you do like a braid So you when you do hair that it's very comped in a way you can Set the level of subdivisions in like a lower side lower side so you can comb it properly But on render you can increase those subdivision levels And that is also part of the hair panel in the render settings You can add like increase. Let's see here for example In zero you will see the actual hair keys But if you increase the subdivision once Twice or three times even you would see how smooth the hair can be and this is not even that expensive because it's done in the GPU So it's a it's a nice settings to like simplify in a way the viewport, but also have it very Subdivided on your render. I Think that's it for now. There also has been improvements on the workbench engine Now they looked a lot more like when you're actually combing They also have this setting for strip and strand. It's it's around It's about the same but of course instead of being an actual tube It's just like a like a plane with shading. So in that case It's faster the workbench supposed to be faster to work with so Still the hair will respond to the settings for example in the viewport display. So if you make it less rough you still see the effect here, but it's still fast to compute and They are drawn also with a little bit of color variation right now It's like a 10% variation so you can actually tell the hairs apart but overall hair is getting some love and Let's hope a new particle system or hair Continuous follows in the future that is all for now and I'll see you again in the next video. Ciao