How to do wet hair?

[cdordelly09]

Hi all! what is the best technique to do the shading for wet hairs? I'm looking for information about techniques to simulate and render wet hair but I can't find a concrete guide to do this.

Thanks!

[lee_griggs · Accepted solution]

You can use Specular IOR values outside of 1.4-1.6 to render wet hair.

[cdordelly09]

Nice! Thanks for your help @Lee Griggs!

[Anonymous]

@Lee Griggs that is useful, but how do you vary the specular power of the aiHair shader? To represent the difference between wet and dry in this case, or just to add variation?

Is the only control over the strength of the specularity the roughness x the 2 tint values?

It may sound perverse but I am not always using the hair shader to represent hair ... even when I am doing hair, it's not always 'realistic' hair. Is the only answer to use the StandardSurface instead?

Thanks for any info.

[lee_griggs]

>Is the only control over the strength of the specularity the roughness x the 2 tint values?

Yes, plus IOR. Is this not working for you?

>It may sound perverse but I am not always using the hair shader to represent hair ... even when I am doing hair, it's not always 'realistic' hair.

In what situations do you need to use Standard Hair instead of Standard Surface?

[Anonymous]

Recently I have been using it for a bright coloured & shiny nylon type fibre (think doll hair). Standard hair was a better choice for me here as it offered the kind of transmissive properties I was after but I did feel a bit constrained by the limits of the hair model's more realistic hair/fur type reflective properties. Similarly if I wanted to differentiate between wet and dry hair I would imagine I would have to blend a hair shader for the dry parts and a standard shader for the wet parts - not sure that simply shifting the IOR would be enough as the wetness is in effect another material...

[lee_griggs]

Nice. Have you tried Mixing the two shaders together?