Epic acquires Shave and a Haircut
Jun 05, 2019 by CGPress Staff
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Epic has announced the acquisition of Shave and a Haircut from Joe Alter. The Maya plugin adds interactive grooming and styling tools for hair and fur plus shaders for offline rendering in Arnold, RenderMan, and V-Ray. An early version of the technology was also integrated in 3DS Max (and Softimage) but at this point, we don’t know if the news affects Max’s Hair tools.
Shave and a Haircut used to cost $399 for a perpetual license. Following the acquisition Epic has announced that the existing version 9.6 Maya plugins and shaders will be made available on GitHub for free for under the Unreal Engine 4 EULA as source code and compiled binaries. Find out more on the Unreal blog.
This is interesting and puzzling at the same time, Epic is working on some sort of design tool integrated in UE4? Either way, I’m really curious to see how this is going to shape out. 🙂
Hair is one of the most complex things to do for real time characters I think, so maybe they want to integrate an easy way to produce hair for characters inside UE 🙂
I have started wondering are they creating all mighty 3d worfklow for game, vfx, vr-movies etc. Maybe they will add also fully photo, video, motion graphics and audio editing features. Oh.. i started dreaming from UE engine with: Affinity Photo / Photoshop inside their unreal engine 🙂 After effects and C4D kind of alternative tools inside UE for mg, DaVinci Resolve, HoudiniFX, Modo’s mesh fusion,The foundry’s Nuke studio and Ocula, silhouettefx, mocha pro, keentools, markless face tracking tools, Reality Capture / Metashape / Zephyr / PixelFarm’s PFTrack/R3DS, Affinity Designer/Illustrator, toonboom animate ableton live, audition, The foundry’s Mari / Quixel Mixer, 3D-Coat & ZBrush and Crhonosculpt/Mush3D/LW’s Metamorphic Animated SculptingPainting.. oh my.. all-in-one software, mother of all dcc softwares <3 No more jumping from app to app / soft to soft. Just one software all in one with some magic workflow to do anything.
-brain: 'Wake up!'
-'What?'
-brain: 'time to go to bed'
-'oh right… its night.'
Yeah, really, how it would affect to Max’s Hair And fur?!
H&F has a lot of bugs, and seems ADSK don’t want to fix it.
Maybe it time rip off H&F from Max and change it to Ornatrix…
I kinda knew a long time ago, that the next logical step for game engines was to become full fledged poly modelling tools (subdivision, sculpt and uvw mapping) with all sorts of VFX (particle, volumetric, hair)/ Why have to switch to an 3d app all the time? It’s also sort of logical for Blender to also become a game engine… Unity, Unreal, Blender 😀
Unity + Unreal + Blender = UniRender .. nice 🙂
Gaming engine have alot of limits as it currently stand I wouldn’t want to make a character in them . and Blender tried the game engine thing they scrapped it .
what limits? can you be specific? I’d say you know little what you’re talking about.. there is no limit hindering game engines to have modeling and texturing tools. Also Blender scraping the game engine was a grave mistake .. so was Autodesk quickly stoping Stingray.. they should have kept it and worked on it.. instead they chose to just give up.
AFAIK, blender guys will make a new game engine after 2.8 stable.
I’m not so sure.. game engines are beasts in terms of complexity as they are.
Integrating industry leading and stable creation tools into that mix would require a massive effort for Unity/Unreal and no doubt some big headaches for devs and content creators. For one thing, the UI’s of game engines are already pretty bloated. I think it makes much more sense to make the import/export process as seamless as possible and retain a choice of creation tools. Having said that I can see how decent realtime hair tools might fit into the same camp as terrain, particle fx and shader creation tools – if only for real-time optimisation reasons and allowing tighter control over visual results in the engine. In fact, perhaps this points to some smarter physics integration into UE4 ready for next gen.. natural hair movement etc?
surprised tho, since shave and hair cut is such a piece of old crap
Could the ‘open source’* release of this acquisition also mean that the US restriction for Yeti is lifted? Joe-sue-a-lot did a good job in the past in regards patent tolling and peregrinere settled to not sell in the US due to some copyright claim.
Not that it bothers me really… since Autodesks way of handling broken features and the prayers that the next update half a year later might fix some severe issues (and not break other stuff) didn’t get answered, I switched to Houdini.
However… it is nice to see that there are also other non hostile acquisitions happening.. not just buy stuff and let it disappear from the market.. or do a half-baked implementation (hello Autodesk…) nope… they bought it and they ‘open-source’* it, nice.
*I used open-source a bit loosely here, it is still bound to Epics EULA, yet available for the general public…
Wonder if this will affect the patents Shave n Haircut hold? Its been an issue for years that several important patents regarding modeling hair has been limited to this pretty slow Hair software. Hoping this results in a change.