Real Time Hair For AAA Games Tutorial by Hamed Ghaeli

This 15-hour video series walks you through a complete, no-fast-forward workflow for creating real-time hair for AAA games. You’ll learn a method that balances high visual quality with smart optimization, letting you build hairstyles that look great and respect vertex budgets. The course covers long hair, short hair, and fades, using Fibershop, Maya, and Marmoset Toolbag as the core tools.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Create and bake hair textures from scratch using Fibershop.
• Place and arrange hair cards efficiently in Maya using the gs curvetools plugin.
• Build custom hair shaders and materials in Marmoset Toolbag.
• Optimize hair models for different vertex budgets.
• Handle short hair by thickening strands and baking onto a mesh.

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic knowledge of navigating Maya, Fibershop, and Marmoset Toolbag.
• Tools: gs curvetools plugin for Maya (recommended), 3-button mouse.
• Hardware: Minimum 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU.

📝 Description

This isn’t a sped-up timelapse. Every click, every decision, and every adjustment is recorded in real-time across 13 full-HD video files. You’ll see exactly how Hamed builds a production-ready hair asset from the ground up.

The core pipeline is straightforward: you start by generating all your textures in Fibershop, then move to Maya to place your hair cards using the gs curvetools plugin. This plugin speeds up the card-laying process significantly, letting you focus on shape and flow rather than tedious manual work. Finally, you jump into Marmoset Toolbag to build a custom hair shader and set up your final render.

The course covers three distinct hairstyles: long, short, and a fade. This variety ensures you understand how to adapt the workflow to different hair types and lengths. For the short hair section, Hamed briefly uses Zbrush, 3ds Max, and Substance Painter to thicken strands and bake them onto a base mesh, but notes that the same result can be achieved with Maya and Marmoset if you prefer.

All videos are unnarrated with soft background music, so you’ll need to follow along visually. The focus is purely on the practical steps, making it a solid resource for artists who already know their way around the software and want to refine their hair creation skills.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Character artists looking to add a reliable real-time hair workflow to their pipeline.
• Intermediate 3D artists comfortable with Maya, Fibershop, and Marmoset who want to specialize in hair.
• Game developers needing to create optimized, high-quality hair for characters.

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Hamed Ghaeli is a character artist who spent over a year testing and refining methods for creating real-time hair. His focus has been on developing a workflow that delivers AAA-quality results while remaining practical for production environments. This course is the culmination of that research, designed to share a proven, repeatable process with other artists.

🏁 Final Result

• A complete, game-ready hairstyle with all associated textures, a custom shader, and a Marmoset Toolbag scene file for rendering.