Faster ways to polygon model anime hair in maya, modo, or zbrush?

fullmetal426

Hi there!

I was wondering if anyone knew any quicker ways to polygon model hair other than making one polygon piece and duplicating it...

over.
and over...
and OVER...
AND OVER...!

Specifically to look something like this.
http://indyzone.jp/catalog/form/houdini/h13/saintseiya/img/image01c.png

Last time I modeled something like this, I duplicated each strand over and over, and I was wondering if there were any tips, tricks, or scripts that could generate hair like this along a curve or with multiple curves in maya. Or a faster way to model hair like this in zbrush. If you guys need any more information, let me know, and i'll respond back as quickly as possible. Thanks for the read!

-Fullmetal426

Popol

Brute force is the best approach to make hair in my opinion. So get ready to duplicate tons of hair strands.

However you can make it easier on yourself by making a quick block out sculpt to get a good idea of the volumes of haircut you want to achieve.
I personally like to use hair and fur in 3dsmax to quickly spread the hair planes on the character's head but it still needs tons of manual tweeks to get it to look good.

On the example you provided i'm pretty sure it's just duplicating, scaling and rotating the same strand of hair.

Check out the polycount wiki for more info on game hair : http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/HairTechnique

skankerzero

I do a lot of hair in that style. Brute force is how I do it.

The best shortcut advice is that the only really unique hair 'clumps' you need are up front and on the sides. Everything behind can be generic clumps with small tweaks for silhouette.

I usually model a single hair clump and use spline deformation to place them around the scalp loosely. Then I go in and hand adjust the intersections so it will be one piece in the end.

CheeseOnToast

The image you showed looked like the hair has volume rather than being strips, so you could replicate that with a custom brush in zbrush. linky :

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_BFWjqNV-s[/ame]