Looking for hair techniques

nico19053

In my endeavors to get into game development, I've just recently started 3d modeling and what I'm about to show you is my first attempt at a realistic human model. My partner is an artist and he's been helping with getting a proper face structure. He also designed the concept for the character which I'll include an image of.



It's the one on the right with the blue afro. Which brings me to my problem:

How do I achieve hair like that? I've been using blender and I've tried a few things.

I tried following a tutorial that came up with something like this. It works well enough, but I can't get that variant color or else you can notice the gaps in the hair.

A recent game (Sunset Overdrive) implemented a nice afro in their character customization and I couldn't find out how they did it.

So I combined the two links in this post and attempted to make something do-able. I didn't have much time to refine this attempt yet, so bear with me. Textures haven't been made yet, either, only bakes AO and applied a solid color.



Hair is made up of many separate planes rather than having rounded planes like in the first link.

Is there any way to make the afro in the concept or should I look for alternatives for the hair? Also, with this hair that I currently have, I'm not sure how lighting will work.

Thanks for your time!

skankerzero

For lighting, you should look into the techniques they use for foliage.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foliage

As far as the example from Sunset Overdrive goes, it looks to be the same technique as the first example you posted. If you look carefully, you can see some flat planes which are given away by the angle of the textures.
Maybe @Gav can shed some light on it.

nico19053

Okay, foliage would make sense. Thanks for the link as well as the link for Gav, I'll shoot him a message.

HughieDM

That foliage wiki is a great place to find possible hair building techniques!

Heres an old lowpoly hair tutorial that has a pretty good afro building technique, at some angle you can see the planes but im sure with a good amount of geo you can mask that a bit more and in the heat of game play most people wont notice.  Varga Hair Tutorial

Whats your poly limit and how do you want the hair to act in game?  Once you have a good idea of that the you can hone in on the best way to build the hair.

Happy modeling!

nico19053

I do like the look of Varga, but doing that with varying colors makes the geometry very noticeable. I've found some methods that involve poly shells I believe is the name. I'm going to look more into that method and if it fails, I'll likely make an attempt at the foliage techniques.

Thanks for the suggestions!