Akuba's Salon

New Discord Server: https://discord.gg/gZMfXvh

Welcome to Akuba's Salon! Art assets by Wafflebutter

id=1938818750

[h1]I can be reached on discord:[/h1]

Realtime basically means the hair utilizes physics-based rendering. It will receive detailed lighting information. The screenshots will do very little to illustrate this. The best experience would be to try it and see. Hairs were tested with an Nvidia GTX 1080 ti card.

This is a mod focusing on bringing various afro-centric hairstyle options to players.

Subscribe, install it, go to any character creation screen and change your hair.

Fairly often we see game developers entirely skip over a sizable portion of gamers because we've been told its 'too difficult', 'they don't play these types of games', or 'too expensive' to try and take on the task of making non-straight hair. Or, it just doesn't occur to them at all to introduce in some games where it makes sense to have that representation because developers are often simply socially isolated - its not that they hold any malice, they just don't have exposure to other types of people. Occasionally there are options, often not done with serious care with the exception of a small handful of games out there in the industry. So here we are, bringing styles to players who are frustrated and tired of getting left out and given excuses - if any words at all - as to why they can't make characters that look like they do.

Everybody out here just wants to make beautiful, cool characters and have a good time, and as artists who are all about expression, helping people do that is big fun!

Background

Several years of work, research, trial and error, have gone into this by WaffleButter. There are a ton of technical hurdles without existing solutions in Conan Exiles/Unreal Engine 4.15, so it has taken Time to get this far. Waffle has had to research other games' art assets, their solutions and workflows, often finding very little information as this type of 3D modelling + Rigging + Texturing and material work isn't something done often. Hours of trial and error, dev-kit sorcery, and then improving on technical processes have been sunk in on a lot of long nights to get this far. There are solutions and plenty of information for straight hair that work great, but for hair with volume, with the intricate shapes possible with black natural hair, those solutions fail. There isn't a lot of help out there, but with a ton of ingenuity and relentless dedication, we have arrived.

A lot of time and love goes into this. This has been supported and funded by Terrornaut of the Deadlands RP-PVP server, via the community's monthly donations that help keep the server going and are alotted toward modder donations or DLC giveaways to support Funcom. Modders don't really get paid despite putting out content people love and spend thousands of hours using, when they're doing industry quality work or even filling in critical features or assets that should be in the base game. If you play on modded servers you are using at least one of these mods and have probably gotten more entertainment out of some of the mod work than many of us have collectively spent going to the movies.

Future Plans:

If you've ever had someone try to get you to do hard work for free, you may know what this feels like. We want to see people making use of professional skills get paid for their time as best we can, so if you'd like to support this endeavor and see more black+brown hairstyles make it into video games, please consider donating - whether it seems small or large, it makes a pretty big difference in our lives and helps us spend more time and get further along to make this a reality!

https://ko-fi.com/wafflebutter

Special Thanks

To Ephraim for R&D assistance. Check out his new Krampus mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1937953841

To Alren Storm, one of the authors of the Emberlight mod, for blueprint insight and assistance. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1369802940

Other Links

WaffleButter's WAUS armor mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1835356127

Makeup used in some images belongs to RP Aesthetics: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1542041983

As always, there will be bugs. Feel free to report them on my discord server, make sure to follow the bug report rules.