Realtime Fur Mantle

This is a realtime fur mantle for a character I've been working on and off on in between other projects (Character concept is by Alexander Shatohin https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rxXqJ ). The asset is rendered in UE5 and has a total of roughly 60k triangles at the moment. There is still room for optimization in terms of tricount.

To place the haircards I used GS Curve Tools https://sladkovsky3d.artstation.com/store/zzR2

The lighting setup used is based on the Metahuman lighting setup on the epic marketplace (https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/mhc-lighting-presets).

The material shader was put together based on the paragon hair shader from Epic Games, I adjusted it and added/changed features based on what I felt was useful or not for me. The goal here was to set up a base for future groom projects as well so I wanted it to be flexible.
Currently, you can update the base colour in a variety of manners like adjusting the tip and root colour and painting a unique vertex colour where you desire. It also includes a basic wind function that is a mix of the simple grass wind and a tutorial by Quixel on creating a world space wind for grass and foliage.
The vertex colour channels control the location of colour variation (R) and the wind factor/mask for parts of the mesh (G).