Iridescent Realtime Hair Shading UE 5 // Hair Grooming 2023

"Iridescent Hair Card Material" (IHCM)
After analysing several Spline and Card Shaders , I supplemented the default Unreal Hair Card Material with missing components (Melanin, Glints, Sun-damage etc.) and focused on "Iridescent Hair Shine" to fake multiple scattering in hair cards: The Research question was to find out in what way Iridescence can increase the color variety within hair shine and if this could solve performance drawbacks during real-time hair rendering.

The node-based shaders were tested on a human character bust created with Maya/Z-Brush. With the help of XGen and baking tools hair cards were manually placed to ensure game-ready usage. Shading, lighting and rendering in Unreal Engine 5.

Research Project: "What is wrong with real-time hair? - An esthetic analysis of real-time rendered and photo-realistic hair fibers" (2022) Bachelor Thesis: "A Multi-Scattering Approximation for Hair Shine based on Iridescence" (2023). If required I can provide more insight into my research results.