How would you go about making multi-dimensional silver hair?

  1. What do you want to achieve? Keep it simple and clear!

I am looking to create a hair color that’s very colorful in shadows and soft regular lights, but when it hits bright lights (example being stage lights/spotlights), it would take on a silvery-shiny appearance that’s more dull in color. I don’t know if that makes sense, so I’m going to share a few pictures as examples. My examples are going to be celebrities since they’re the ones I know of that have this color effect in their hair, I tried googling examples of regular people having this hair as well, but wasn’t able to find any.

My first example being Lady Gaga, in backstage photos and meet and greets, her wig is a multi-colored teal and it’s very colorful.


Meanwhile on stage, it seems to bounce off the bright stage lights, reflecting to make a more silvery color.

My second example is Melanie Martinez, both of my example images for her are going to be from a stage performance since she’s never photographed backstage wearing this particular wig & the lighting in her performances aren’t that bright anyways. Focus on the right side of her wig since that’s where the silver effect is:
First picture, the right side of her wig is vibrant in color.


Second picture, the right side of her wig doesn’t really have its color, it reflects off the stage lights making it look grey/silvery in appearance.

  1. What is the issue? Include enough details if possible!

I’m not really sure if this is possible to pull off, I haven’t seen any UGC creators or game developers that make vibrant hair with a silvery effect like I’m going for. I know it’s possible to create a texture of the vibrant hair color and a texture of the dull hair color, but you can only put one texture on a mesh. I don’t want my hair colors to always look vibrant or always look dull, I want it to look vibrant but also look silvery when it comes across bright lights like my examples.

  1. What solutions have you thought of so far?

I’ve thought of using the metallic map on surface appearances to execute this idea, but I haven’t tried it yet. However I’m not really on board with that idea because the hair would end up being dull and dark when it’s not in light anyways. I’m looking for something that’ll still have bright vibrant colors even when it’s not in light.

Anyways, I really just came to the forums to ask anybody who’s listening for their input about what I could try doing. It’s a cool idea that I want to implement into an upcoming game I’m working on and I’m posting this in case anybody else wants to try it for their own games too (if somebody ever finds a solution).

Yeah… I think a metalic map will be your best bet. (try maybe a solid grey? so its 50%~ish)

But You could also try messing with the reflectance of the mesh and if your skybox is a certain color it should reflect the skybox depending on the situation.

ORRRR you could code something that determines the light levels around the hair and changes its metalness or reflectiveness respectively.

or maybe mess around with custom normals? idk

1 Like

Marking this as the solution, I found that the grey metallic map really helped as it gave that effect + it wasn’t an overpowering amount of dark when it wasn’t in the light. Thanks !!!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.