Curly Hair

Zephir62

Whats everyone's technique for making/setting up low-poly curly hair? I've been trying to figure this one out and all the methods I tried haven't really worked too well(see below example using planes).

Ruz

probably just lots of poly planes and careful mapping. you seem to be on the right track anyway

Bryan Cavett

Ive been playing with hair lately... though not curly hair. I have found it a good idea to play with the hair system in max 8 and 9 to style and create your planes of hair. In this shot i rendered hair out of max to get my texture map and applied it to a plane. I then set up splines to use as guides and i used the hair sytem to style and place the planes on a hair cap. Pretty nice results you just need to be careful of the poly limit. The count is increased in this shot but I could dramatically decrease the count if the head was textured underneath.

Spark

Hey Bryan, nice looking sculpt (though I am suprised you aren't working in Mudbox, as I personally hate that you have to deal with seeing the facets in Z) Gears of War also did something similiar to what Bryan is doing Zephir, if you don't have to worry about a poly budget then follow his example, if you are, then try painting in most of the hair and use a limited amount of polys for pieces that come way off the hairline. Note, you also can reduce alot of the polys that are in the face, reducing your poly count and using that towards polys for the hair.

Spark
www.bbriley.com

thomasp

a mix of solid geometry and polyplanes is the way to go but make sure that if your mesh is for export into some engine, do preview it there as soon as possible. there are lots of display problems to run into in my experience.

hair is a bitch to create, unfortunately.