Character Hair Feedback

sarasumm

Hey, Polycount! I'm looking to get some feedback on a character I'm working on. The character is a recreation of this concept piece by Lesly Oh. So far, the parts that I have mostly 'finished' are the face and hair (the body is about 60% there, so I'll post that after I do some more work.) I feel the hair isn't working the way I want to yet - it feels kind of lifeless. Any advice? Thanks in advance!

JamesBrisnehan

I don't know much about modeling hair, but to me it looks like the hair could be clumped together more with some highlights added to help define the secondary and tertiary shapes. (kind of like this https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YAvvd) Also it looks like the anti-aliasing needs to be turned up or something. Maybe there is too much space between hair strands in the transparency mask, or maybe the resolution is too low, I don't know actually.

PeterMurphy

Looks pretty good to me actually, Maybe just add some of those wavy shapes to some of the outer cards and check the silhouette of the hair.  In the reference there is an indent in the silhouette of the hair just under her right eyelid.  Also, there are some playful whisps of wavy hair towards the bottom.   I'd also check why the bottom of the hair is so dark and not catching any light.  Could it be the lighting or something else?  I am learning hair now too and its a pain.  If you are using marmoset the hair looks 100 times better if you use subsurface scattering instead of lambert for the shader.  

sarasumm

Thanks for the feedback! I made some adjustments to the lighting - trying to get it to reflect on the hair better. I split the hair up into two groups. One is the 'main' hair which is dark and almost black. The other is whispier and slightly lighter. Using the subsurface shader helped too. The translucency makes the darker stands more visible.

Alex_J

No expert on this stuff, but I think you need more "hero" strands if you know what I mean. The separate clump on her front right side needs to stand out with that bold highlight. And the curve where it turns in toward head needs to catch a bold specular highlight as well. Maybe you just need to adjust lighting and material qualities so we can see the form/volume of the hair more distinctly. 

I wouldn't sweat getting a little out of total PBR realism if it means getting the concept nailed down. It seems the concept artist had a more cell shaded rendering style in mind. If you wanted to go more realistic, I think you need to adjust and perhaps exaggerate the volume of the hair a bit. I do think you could use a bit more specular highlights regardless though. 

I went back and looked at your first image -- I think the specularity was more correct there. Just needs more shape in the hair geo itself. Perhaps another layer of flyaway on top as well.

sarasumm

I did some more tweaking with the shader and lighting. I got closer to the specularity in my first pass, which is starting to work a lot better. I couldn't recreate the dramatic rim lighting from the concept, so I just focused it more around the lower sides of the hair. I sort of 'combed' the hair on the sides more into clumps.

Once I add in the full body to the scene I'll likely need to do some more tweaking to the lights. But for now, this is much closer to what I'm aiming for. Thanks, everybody for the helpful comments!