Long hair for game characters workflow?

acitone

Hi fellows I was looking for some insight into your workflow when working with characters and creating an item such as long (maybe shoulder length) hair or pony tails and how you go about creating it. Are there any shortcuts besides carefully placing each hair plane on the character's head?

Jibby

I use Maya for my stuff and what I like to do is draw curves in the shape I want. Then I loft those curves into a polygonal shape. Then I style that mesh closer to my desired look and finally modify the UVs to fit the hair texture I've already made. Then the final polish which is just adding more hair planes over top to cover bald patches and make it look even more realistic by adding stray hairs and such. Hope this helps!

melviso

I make one hair clump usually long ,uvmap it,texture it with alpha and then start duplicating it,resizing and moving it around the head with the lattice deformer,u may have to adjust the shape by moving individual vertices around.Repeat till u have a head full of hair.

acitone

Very informative and inspiring thanks Jibby, Melviso.

I use Max and am familiar with lofting but wasn't really sure how it works. I guess maybe the equivalent for Maya Curves is the NURB CV Curves in Max? I'm going to try it, but the problem I had was getting the spline curve to start from the top of the mesh, I don't know if I need special snap settings enabled or not.

By the way, do you use the same UV space for all hair geometry?

spacefrog

In Max , simply use ordinary splines for the hair. Don't even consider Nurbs in Max for this. Then you can use extrude to generate the geometry. Enable generate UV on the spline rollout and an UV unwrap on top of that to tweak the uv mapping. Then Copy/Instance the extruded spline to generate your various hair "strands". If you are satisfied with the distribution of the strands, you can start tweaking the individual strands to make them look as you want. Of course you have to break the instance then, otherwise all tweaks/changes would be on each of the strands...
After that you can do whatever you like with that geometry /( modify UV',s collapse to one object wetc.. .)

EDIT:
You can even use Hair&Fur ( if you are brave) to generate your hair splines. That way you can use the hair combing/styling features to tweak your initial hair shapes. There is a Guides->Splines or Hair->Splines conversion button in there. After you got your hair splines, you can delete the hair modifier of course...
To generate the geo from those splines ( which are in one object and extrude does'nt work good in this) , you can use Spline's render in viewport feature using rectangle and a thickness of zero. Be sure to vertex weld afterwards as this produces thickness which you want to remove...
In my test this generates to many unwanted hair splines, but i only toyed arround for 5 minutes ;-)

acitone

Hey spacefrog, thanks a bunch for those hints, they sound like a great method. I never even knew you can extrude splines until now. What sounds really interesting too is the Hair & Fur to splines conversion method. I had read something about it but didn't know how it worked.

So if I have say, 200 hair planes to work with, how should I go about UV Unwrapping them? Would it be wise to pack all of them in the same UV space or?

Edit : AH I see. So you want to UVW Unwrap the first plane before duplicating it? And when finished, is it ok to combine all of the hair planes into one mesh?