The patch for v.2.0.2 is ready !
- Improvements
- Changing the scale of a mesh immediately updates the fur accordingly
Have a great week!
[XFUR 3 OUT NOW] XFur Studio 2 - The most advanced fur for unity, in all platforms and all pipelines
We have released a short video demonstration of the kind of control you can have in XFur Studio 2 when grooming the fur of a character:
Grooming works on animated characters as well as on standard meshes, it can be done inside of the XFur Designer editor included with the tool, through the API at runtime or using the Painter Object if you do not want to (or do not have enough experience to) do your runtime fur editing through code.
We are doing some (right now very early) experiments for curly / messy fur types. Despite being early experiments the results so far are quite promising 
The “curling” process is entirely shader driven and can be configured within the XFur Studio Instance UI. This feature will be released in beta state sometime in the near future, but no specific ETA is available right now since we want to make sure it is as usable and flexible as possible before making it public.
Remember that XFur Studio 2 has been invited to the extension of the Reboot 2020 sale, and you can get it with a 50% off but only until September 30!
Have a great weekend, everyone !
1 Like
A small patch with some fixes and small improvements will be available within the next few days (we expect it to be available before Friday), including :
- Fixes for the Universal RP demo
- Updated documentation for additional clarity on some topics
- Minor improvements to XFur Studio Designer UI
- Minor improvements to XFur Studio Instance UI
- New zooming mode for XFur Studio Designer using the “+” and “-” keys on the keypad
If you need the fix for the Universal RP demo please contact us to our support email with your invoice / proof of purchase.
The Curly update will be available later, hopefully around mid October though we are still polishing some details and preparing the XFur Studio Instance UI and internal resources to easily go in and out of Beta mode so that, from now on, users who want to test the newest XFur Studio 2 features that may still be in development can do so safely while ensuring that they can go back to the Stable feature set without losing any important settings.
It goes without saying, but making a backup is still highly recommended if you plan to use any beta features from future XFur Studio 2 releases!
Have a great week!
Version 2.0.5 ( minor patch ) is now available ! :
-
Fixes for the Universal RP demo
-
Updated documentation for additional clarity on some topics
-
Minor improvements to XFur Studio Designer UI
-
Minor improvements to XFur Studio Instance UI
-
New zooming mode for XFur Studio Designer using the “+” and “-” keys on the keypad
Again, the “Curly” update will be available later, most likely in October along some other new features and the corresponding documentation / tutorials.
And also we want to remind you that the Reboot sale ends on September 30 so these are the last days to get XFur Studio 2 with a 50% off !
Have a great week!
A small patch will be released before the end of the week to ensure that scaling of models (especially skinned meshes) behaves in a more predictable way. A new “Auto Adjust Parameters for Scale” toggle will also be included.
There is also another special experiment we are currently running that will definitely interest mobile developers, which we will be showing either tomorrow or on Friday
Have a great week !
The scaling patch will be sent to the store later today to be approved around Friday.
Also, as promised yesterday, here is the result of some tests we have been doing regarding mobile development. We have tested and can now confirm that XFur Studio 2 is compatible with ARFoundation apps !
disloyalcrispdoe
And with a quite smooth performance, even under the stress of several characters on screen
This test was rendered in a Redmi Note 8. The GIF does not reflect the full quality of the app since the recording is limited to a 1280x720 resolution.
Have a great day!
1 Like
After the first month since the release of XFur Studio 2 we have a considerably large amount of new users trying XFur Studio products for the first time.
First of all : welcome, we are very glad you have chosen our tool for your projects!
However, with such a large amount of brand new users of all experience levels we believe that some additional learning materials may be necessary. Because of this, during the months of October and November we will be uploading new tutorials and updating our documentation to make it more friendly as well as to provide additional examples, more detailed guides and other learning materials that may be helpful.
We plan to have the first updates to our learning materials available next week. We hope it will be very helpful to all of you, whether you are a new or an experienced XFur Studio / XFur Mobile user, and that with these materials you can take full advantage of everything that XFur Studio 2 offers as well as the brand new features (for which we are very excited ! ) coming in the next few months.
Have a great weekend everyone !
Version 2.0.6 of XFur Studio 2 is now available :
- Improvements to mesh scaling when using Skinned Meshes
- Auto-scale adjustment for the fur length (this can be turned off in meshes that do not require it to revert back to pre-2.0.6 behavior
Version 2.0.7 will be available near the end of this week with even more improvements and new content :
Fixes and improvements :
- Highly improved wind simulation
- Improved auto-scale behavior
- General QoL fixes for XFur Studio Designer
- Improved tiling for procedurally generated fur strands
New :
- New samples / tutorials
- New simple 3D model to showcase fur and, later this month, newer features
- New fur strands sampling method to reduce visible tiling
- New fur strand parameters to control per-pass size variation
- Procedurally generated fur strand maps can now be exported as .png textures for easy editing in external software such as Photoshop / GIMP.
Version 2.0.7 is now available with the following changes :
Fixes and improvements :
- Highly improved wind simulation
- Improved auto-scale behavior
- General QoL fixes for XFur Studio Designer
- Improved tiling for procedurally generated fur strands
New :
- New samples / tutorials
- New simple 3D model to showcase fur and, later this month, newer features
- New fur strands sampling method to reduce visible tiling
- New fur strand parameters to control per-pass size variation
- Procedurally generated fur strand maps can now be exported as .png textures for easy editing in external software such as Photoshop / GIMP.
We are currently working in the major update 2.1.x for XFur Studio 2, which will contain several new features and improvements and is being referred to, internally, as the “CURLY” update
Fixes and improvements ;
- Improved Rim color mixing to allow for a wider variety of effects
- Improved fur strand seamless repetition
- Improved texture projection to reduce visible tiling has been ported to HDRP and URP
- Improved wind simulation has been ported to HDRP and URP
- Improved fur shadowing and shadows in HDRP and URP
New features :
- Fur strands now have more variation to produce more natural looking fur
- Fur coloration modifier of each fur strand pass can now be manually adjusted
- Fur rim color can now be boosted manually for better results
- Fur strands can be manually curled in both X and Y axes to produce curly / messy fur
- Custom, hand made fur strands textures for curly fur types
We are also considering adding a new 16 samples Basic Shells variant to allow for a little extra quality (with some additional draw calls) but this will most likely come in a later update.
Curly fur in Universal RP :
Curly fur in Standard RP :
Curly fur interacting with wind :
backarcticdolphin
Have a great weekend, everyone !
Version 2.1.0, in other words, the CURLY UPDATE, is now available
New features :
- Fur strands now have more variation to produce more natural looking fur
- Fur coloration modifier of each fur strand pass can now be manually adjusted
- Fur rim color can now be boosted manually for better results
- Fur strands can be manually curled in both X and Y axes to produce curly / messy fur
- Custom, hand made fur strands textures for curly fur types
Fixes and improvements ;
- Improved Rim color mixing to allow for a wider variety of effects
- Improved fur strand seamless repetition
- Improved texture projection to reduce visible tiling has been ported to HDRP and URP
- Improved wind simulation has been ported to HDRP and URP
- Improved fur shadowing and shadows in HDRP and URP
Please remember to read the manual included with the asset (the online version of the manual will be updated this week) as it contains useful information about the use of BETA features within XFur Studio 2 and how to start using the curly fur.
devotedbravecanary
backarcticdolphin
Again, as this is a beta feature, it may (and most likely will) change in the next versions as we adjust and improve its workflow to achieve the best possible results and as many variations as possible. Procedurally generated fur strands are going to receive updates soon as well so stay tuned for that
We hope that this update will be very helpful to all your projects !
1 Like
Wow, awesome stuff. Picked this up yesterday, and I’m not doing much but the bare bones basics, and it already looks better than I expected to be able to do!
Thanks so much for the hard work!
I will note that when I get too many enemies on screen my framerate drops considerably … getting this to look good close up in HDRP means every entity counts. I love your LOD stuff … but is there any way you can build something in which will take into account how many instances are being rendered on screen and adjusting based on that, as opposed to only in relation to the entity’s self, or maybe a better suggestion is a way to scale based off frames per second?
I’m going to have to either do the first idea with OnBecameVisible/Invisible or the second … this wont be playable otherwise since I have to support the player deciding to run around amassing enemies and being stupid (within reason) ;). I figure I cant be the only person making a game where the enemies can range from 1 - X, where X is dependent on what the player does, so this may be useful in general if you can build it in.
Thanks!
1 Like
Thank you very much ! We are very glad to hear you like our software
Also, thank you very much for your feedback. While fur is one of the most demanding effects to render in real-time and as such it is very difficult to maintain high framerates with many, many characters at once (especially in HDRP / URP due to some limitations when compared to the Built-in renderer) we are indeed looking at different methods to increase performance and adjust the quality of all instances in a scene dynamically depending on target framerate / max instance counts etc., but there is no specific deadline for this yet as we are working on several features at the same time at the moment.
However, we can hopefully have some more advanced LOD manager in place, at least in beta form, around mid-late November
Thank you again for your feedback and for your kind words!
That would be great. There’s no immediate rush on my part, just recognizing that this will need to be solved eventually to use it in my game (first person and can run around, so the player can end up having multiple monsters running after him), and I’d rather it be done in a proper non-hacky way by the people who understand what they’re doing :).
1 Like
With the Curly update now available, we will start working on the November updates to our other modules as well as on adding new features and QoL improvements across the entire XFur Studio 2 workflow (on top of the new learning materials ! ). We are very glad with the great reception this asset is getting and all the feedback received so far, which will be very useful as we continue to improve XFur
There’s still a lot of work and coding to do…which seems appropriate with today being 10.24 
Have a great weekend, everyone !
Is there any way to make the fur follow the tessellated model? The fur has some hard angles as it follows the model, whereas just a bit of tessellation on LOD0 would make this look much better.
I’m fine if the proper solution is “just paint the fur on better”. Let me know if the intended workflow is a lower poly mesh and getting curves on the fur through painting, or naturally by following the curves of the model. It would definitely be quicker to follow the curves …
Actually. What I really want is an option in the designer to make the fur follow the curves that the model would have IF it were tessellated. That way the base model could stay the same … its really only the fur that needs its length to curve gently.
First pass at a wolf, notice the hard angles on the fur. The bit around the face is my fault, that was me with the painter going to fast. The part around the back area though I didnt touch. Not sure the best method to make sure the fur is curved around the whole body by default.
Hi there,
The fur is entirely based off the model’s surface, vertices and normals. This means that if you need / want softer looking edges on your fur you would need additional geometry in your model as well and that if a low poly model has a hard edge look while in certain poses the fur will have the same hard edged look since, once again, it is based on the source model provided. The basic concept behind this would be that if you have a character’s neck made of < 12 polygons (just to say a number) that needs to be bent it will probably have some very hard edges and it will not look like a uniform, smooth curve. Once you add fur, the fur will be working with those same <12 polygons so there is no possible way of making the curves in the fur look any smoother than the base model without adding more polygons either to the model itself on your 3D modelling app or through shader based tessellation.
Having actual tessellation on the fur shader is not currently supported since tessellation is not yet officially supported in stable shader graph releases. Once tessellation is fully supported in a stable Shader Graph release we will consider adding it to the shader to allow for a better look on low poly characters without modifying the base mesh.
We are aware that some tools (such as Amplify’s Shader Editor) support tessellation in HDRP but ShaderGraph is the only official, Unity supported shader creation method for HDRP and URP and the only one with guaranteed compatibility across newer SRP releases and as such it is the only shader creation tool we can use in order to guarantee our tool will also continue working across SRP releases without depending on any third parties.
Tessellation on fur may arrive earlier to the Built-in pipeline since tessellation is much better supported there.
For reference, our Holly model (the little fox used in our promotional videos) has a little over 6k polygons in total to ensure that every part of the model is smooth and rounded and thus that the fur looks just as round.
Fur length and grooming are calculated on a vertex basis which means that the amount of control you have over their appearance and the precision of these adjustments depends entirely in the amount of vertices of your character. If you wanted to shave a 256 tris sphere to look like a much rounder 1024 tris one this might be possible but it would need to be done by hand and with quite a bit of effort and once again, the results would be limited since the precision of the length variations would be tied to the vertex count.
In most cases, simply making a version of the model with a higher polygon count might be easier.
In short :
-
Fur will be generated and look as smooth and rounded as the base mesh. If rounder / smoother results are needed, a rounder / higher resolution mesh is needed as well.
-
This could be solved through shader based tessellation but since there is no official support for tessellation in ShaderGraph yet, we cannot implement it into HDRP / URP at the moment. Unfortunately, just like with this feature, there are many many other useful tools that have not yet been ported to URP / HDRP. Once it is supported in a stable ShaderGraph release, we will include tessellation support precisely to improve situations like these
-
Tessellated fur might be supported in the built-in renderer before our holiday break in beta form since tessellation is much better supported in Built-in based surface shaders.
We hope this helps !
Yep, that sounds great. I’ll hold out hopes that tessellation officially makes its way into HDRP sometime in the next year :). I’m not an artist and I don’t have the funds to hire people, so anything that requires N number of models to change becomes too time consuming for me. Tessellation would really “just work”, and for my situation, is the only real feasible option.
Thanks for considering this in the future, it would really help!!
1 Like