Agreed with Vig. It totally depends on what you want to do! Do you plan to emulate the style of a game already in existence? Is this all out of the blue? Do you have the face modeled already? If so, what style does it suggest?
It most likely will influence how you will do eyebrows aswell :P
Depending on how realistic you plan on taking the character and your budget, it looks like (according to the concept) you're going to be making very clumpy Cloud-esk spikes maybe with a few transparencies to soften them up. With a concept like that you could make liberal use of a toon shader and help get that spikey silhouette with random floating details, look. But now we're venturing into areas that your engine may or may not do.
If you are able to use a toon shader, then you want to model a huge helmet wit a few details pulled out to catch the shader.
Either way, kick your concept artist in the nuts for drawing spikey silhouette hair and not giving any consideration to how it would translate to 3D.
just do plain geometry for that, it's the best solution for the style you're trying to achieve.
You will have more difficulties with the face than with the hairs... trust me
I agree with Funshark. That look would do better as a sculpted solid mesh. (as opposed to poly strips with alpha masking) Remember to keep the edges hard, and don't skimp on the stylization of the sculpt.
Also, the actual purpose of the model figures into this. Are we talking low-poly in-game, or high-poly render? This affects the methods available to you. If you are doing a low-poly in-game model, you could use an alpha-masked Doom-style sprite to simulate the desired effect. That would require some programming, but could potentially look pretty cool in action.
A "Sprite" is a 2D visual element in a game. But that's rather obvious. Doom used an interesting visual trick whereby you could make animated characters that "looked" 3D. It did this by drawing them on a flat 3D plane that always faced the camera. It swapped the images on the 3D plane depending on which direction the character was facing.
You could conceivably use a similar technique to give a permanent, "illustrated" jagged edge to your character's hair. It would only work for a lower-poly character, and only if there weren't numerous camera angles. If you looked directly down at the character from above the effect would probably lose some of its ooomph. You would need to put a 3D sprite in the middle of your character's head, with a hair texture alpha-mapped to it. That way the spikey edge of the hair would be consistent.
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It most likely will influence how you will do eyebrows aswell :P
If you are able to use a toon shader, then you want to model a huge helmet wit a few details pulled out to catch the shader.
Either way, kick your concept artist in the nuts for drawing spikey silhouette hair and not giving any consideration to how it would translate to 3D.
You will have more difficulties with the face than with the hairs... trust me
Also, the actual purpose of the model figures into this. Are we talking low-poly in-game, or high-poly render? This affects the methods available to you. If you are doing a low-poly in-game model, you could use an alpha-masked Doom-style sprite to simulate the desired effect. That would require some programming, but could potentially look pretty cool in action.
Oh, and she doesn't have nuts. What do I do now?
A "Sprite" is a 2D visual element in a game. But that's rather obvious. Doom used an interesting visual trick whereby you could make animated characters that "looked" 3D. It did this by drawing them on a flat 3D plane that always faced the camera. It swapped the images on the 3D plane depending on which direction the character was facing.
You could conceivably use a similar technique to give a permanent, "illustrated" jagged edge to your character's hair. It would only work for a lower-poly character, and only if there weren't numerous camera angles. If you looked directly down at the character from above the effect would probably lose some of its ooomph. You would need to put a 3D sprite in the middle of your character's head, with a hair texture alpha-mapped to it. That way the spikey edge of the hair would be consistent.