Tutorial: Creating a Real-Time Horse Groom for Games
The Gnomon Workshop has released Creating a Real-Time Horse Groom for Games, a guide to creating and optimizing hair and fur grooms recorded by CFX Supervisor Guillermo Cortés.
The intermediate-to-advanced workshop provides over two hours of video training in Maya, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter, Marmoset Toolbag and Unreal Engine.
Groom a 3D creature in Maya and optimize the groom for use in Unreal Engine
In the workshop, Cortés demonstrates his complete workflow for creating a realistic groom optimized for use in a real-time environment, using a horse as an example character.
He begins by using XGen, Maya’s grooming toolset to create grooms for the horse’s mane, tail and hide.
Cortés then prepares the groom for real-time use by using the Maya add-on GS CurveTools and standalone application FiberShop to convert them to hair cards.
The textures for the cards are created by baking maps from the groom in Marmoset Toolbag, and enhancing them in Substance 3D Painter.
In the final section of the tutorial, Cortés explains how to import the hair cards into Unreal Engine, and set up a suitable hair shader.
Topics covered in the workshop include how to achieve believable directionality, flow, and volume while maintaining real-time performance.
About the artist
Guillermo Cortés is a Grooming and CFX Supervisor, working on commercials, VFX and games. He has worked on projects for Meta/Facebook, Netflix, Sony Entertainment, and Electronic Arts.
Price and availability
Creating a Real-Time Horse Groom for Games is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.
Subscriptions cost $57/month or $499/year. Free trials are available.
Read more about Creating a Real-Time Horse Groom for Games
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.
Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.