Prior to December, we had a great opportunity to do a Q/A session with Carlos Montero, VP of Graphics Technology for Neoglyphic. If you’re not familiar with Neoglyphic, but you enjoy creating animation or doing something in Unity/Unreal Engine, then maybe you should get to know them. They create a product that is pretty impressive called Neofur. It’s an inexpensive plugin that helps create reactive fur and short-fibers. That may not seem like a big deal until you look at movies like Zootopia or Monsters, Inc. and admire the flowing fur of some of the characters. Creating effects like this adds not only ‘wow’ to the experience, but also realism and beauty to the project. And generally things like this aren’t so darn affordable.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, let’s get to this Q/A.
Can you tell us a little about who you are, your background, and how you were connected with Neoglyphic Entertainment?
I am Carlos Montero, VP of Graphics Technology at Neoglyphic. I have a background leading teams and projects as an artist and technical artist in the games industry.
What is NeoFur and how did it come about? What can people use this for?
NeoFur is a plugin for real-time engines (Unreal and Unity right now) that makes it easy for developers to add dynamic, reactive fur and short-fibers to their projects. It has a wide range of uses; we have customers from Hollywood/VFX, PC, console and mobile game studios, and VR/AR shops. It came about as a response to our own need, we were developing an intellectual property that needed high quality fur that worked on a variety of platforms. The most obvious use case is for furry, fuzzy creatures – but the tool is powerful and we have seen success for soft, dynamic surfaces such as moss, grasses, carpets, fabrics and more.
How easy is the plugin to work with in Unity? What type of skill set would someone need to use it?
The plugin is extremely easy, it’s as simple as adding a component and tweaking parameters. If you really want to control the length and directionality of your fur, we have easy authoring methods we support via morph targets (in addition to spline support), with no extra software or training required.
Does Neoglyphic provide tutorials online on basic usage or any training material for entry level users?
Absolutely, we have a growing library of video tutorials on our YouTube channel, and a full suite of documentation on our website as well!
The plugin looks fantastic from the demo, what is the price point for this?
We’ve adopted tiered pricing to keep ourselves indie-friendly: $19 for personal use and $99 for a full-commercial Indie license. We also have options for source code and other enterprise level requests if studios need something custom. Our NeoFur for Unity Indie product is actually available at 30% off right now, until November 30.*
One of the bigger worries with having such powerful tools, such is the case with Neofur, is not being able to afford it or use it properly (see Maya for example of both). It looks as if Neofur has both of those issues solved. We expect to see some more lovely things from this company. In the meantime, check them out.
*Yes, we were late on posting this, but hey! Still a helluva program.