Redoing real time hair for my character

D_Choi

I recently finished(kind of) one of my character, but I always felt bad especially about the hair. It was done too quickly without proper plan and knowledge. So rather than start a new project, I decided to work on it again, and I think it would be a nice learning process about hair. This time I created a quick sculpt in Zbrush to use it as a guide for the shape and hair flow. Hopefully I will get it right this time. I'll keep update my process whenever possible. 

bkost

Hi D_Choi, I'm excited to follow your progress on your real-time hair.

I'm currently studying hair cards as well, I'm following Adam Skutt's general workflow. What about you? Perhaps we can share our best practices (:

Here is my work in progress so far, still fiddling around with "what should my collection of hair cards look like to nail the look". Lots of experimenting left! 

jose.fuentes

im curious to see where you take this as well.  @bkost im also following Skutt's workflow!  Cant wait to see your updates

D_Choi

@bkost @jose.fuentes I applied Adam Skutt's tutorial for my male character but I always wanted to find different way to place hair card for longer hair. I found Georgian Avasilcutei Tutorial few days ago and he was using curves to place cards, I still need to find way to apply his way in Maya but I think I'm going to try it.

jose.fuentes

Yeah i saw that too, but i dont use Max

bkost

@D_Choi @jose.fuentes Hey guys, so I think ya'll are in luck! I was also wanting to start from curves and convert to geo, at first I was using the maya's CVs to geo tool but that wasn't giving me much control with the results.

I was shown this wonderful scripter named sizovalex, he has two scripts. One for grabbing and controlling hair cards and the other is for generating geo from splines (you get lots of control with this script!). These two wonderful scripts have helped make card creation much less awful.

-Gumroad for script downloads
-Youtube tutorial for Tuber (see comments for porting to maya 2016+)

And shout out to @erroldynamic for telling me about sizovalex (:

D_Choi

@bkost Thanks for sharing it I agree that using curve to control cards in Maya is a bit tricky compare to Max. I ended up using quad draw on reference sculpt and tweak each card carefully. After watching some tutorials I set some rules for placing cards and currently testing it on my work. I'm looking forward to see the end result to see if it work

D_Choi

Almost toward the end, I think it got better than the last one

D_Choi

Finished and uploaded it She looks way better now

bkost

@D_Choi Hey man, I'm digging the result! It looks much softer than before, I like the shading as well! Perhaps more breakup on the sideburns and have them clump more.

Could you provide some info on your hair textures/best practices? How did you plan out how the hair texture sets should look?

D_Choi

@bkost Hey, Sorry for late reply I got an art test and was stuck on it for a while. I'll write down some stuff I learned this time. I placed hair card a bit more broad with denser hair texture on bottom to cover the scalp and more narrow and less hair density while moving to the surface. Eventually cards get really thinner with fewer hair strand while it goes further out from the scarp. I used quad draw on reference mesh rather than make straight quad plane and try to bend it. But I think I will try Zbrush's plane drawing brush next time for a starting point, just to test if it's faster and giving me more control. For texture/alpha, I think it looks better when hairs more straight rather than have curls on it, except cards for fly away hairs. If you need curls, unless it's really curly hair, just bend the card naturally. These are just rules I applied my self this time so I'm sure there should be better/faster way to do it. Let me know if you find other approaches for better result I guess it's all about having fun and experiment to find better ways.

D_Choi

@Sylvy If you following Adam Skutt's hair tutorial, I used to have issues aligning normal map with other textures as well. Instead I just used AO in Photoshop to get normal map

bkost

Hey @D_Choi I've also been using quad draw. Tonight I tried out setting "hair clumps" where there is a group of 3 hair cards that you then manipulate and lay down on the head. Inspired from this tutorial

I'm looking for feedback on my female hair groom. I've come to a barrier that I cant seem to hop over, I'm having lots of trouble on the look dev and figuring out the best practice to nail down the reference. If you guys have some time, I'd appreciate it if you could take a look at my breakdown post here 

Cheers

D_Choi

bkost said:

Hey @D_Choi I've also been using quad draw. Tonight I tried out setting "hair clumps" where there is a group of 3 hair cards that you then manipulate and lay down on the head. Inspired from this tutorial

I'm looking for feedback on my female hair groom. I've come to a barrier that I cant seem to hop over, I'm having lots of trouble on the look dev and figuring out the best practice to nail down the reference. If you guys have some time, I'd appreciate it if you could take a look at my breakdown post here 

Cheers

I think the texture you using is too dense and need more cuts and clumping on it If it's from Xgen. Just use one card that can cover the scalp, and others on top of it to give volumes and details. Try not to use too many cards to fill all the gaps, it looks better with right amount of gaps between layers. And I would put one more edge in center of the cards and make it more V shape on tip of the card, and more flat to the root. This way can cover many gaps between cards in different angles.