Using "modular" hair for characters. How hard would it be to achieve?

Shuriken UK

EZ all, I've got a bald character, which I'm gonna have to call an android of some kind (because hes THAT low poly). What I originally wanted to do was just have the one, bald guy, but then I thought "hang on a minute, what if I were to create a set of modular 'hair-caps', and be able to interchange them between different copies of the same character".

So now I've been thinking of ways that this might be possible (hopefully none of them involving any programming whatsoever). I havent tried it yet, but what about sockets? Would I be able to add, say 5 copies of these androids into my scene, then just use sockets to attach different hairstyles to each one of them?

Im open to modelling suggestions if you want to give them, but I'm mainly concerned with the UDK side of things. I should be able to knock up a few simple hair styles in an hour or so, but knowing how to put them to use is where the problem lies!

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this! Its been a while since I've used UDK, but Im getting back into it again.

Edit: Okay... I THOUGHT I'd be able to make some hairstyles, buts its just not happening. I assumed you could just highlight a selection of "lines/edges" around the head of the character (which basically forms the shape of the hairline), then simply convert it to a shape, and finally convert it to an Editable Poly, so it can be extruded outwards in border subobject mode. For some reason this just doesn't work though. As soon as I turn the shape into an editpoly, all I'm left with are vertices, and the lines/edges that should be connecting them together just disappear.

I think I'll need some help with that too then LOL!

sprunghunt

Shuriken UK wrote: »

So now I've been thinking of ways that this might be possible (hopefully none of them involving any programming whatsoever). I havent tried it yet, but what about sockets? Would I be able to add, say 5 copies of these androids into my scene, then just use sockets to attach different hairstyles to each one of them?

you can do exactly this. You'd use kismet to attach the actors.

Shuriken UK

BRILLIANT! Now I just need to learn how to make hair. I'm currently trying to make some using a bunch of long curved planes, which I made by extruding splines then converting to editpoly's. I hope I'm going in the right direction though, because its taking a while, and now I've got around 20 "hair fins".

Hopefully, what I'll be able to do is eventually merge them into a single mesh, then unwrap each fin so I can create the textures and an opacity map.

darthwilson

Here's some things to help you..

Modelling hair using rendered splines:

http://www.3dm3.com/visits/1439

Painting Hair and alphas:

http://www.paultosca.com/makingofvarga.html

Creating a nice hair shader for UDK

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CreatingHairUsingAlpha.html

I recently made a customisation system in UE3 myself
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzQAIKIgq2Y"]Character Customisation Prototype in UE3 - YouTube[/ame]

Shuriken UK

Thanks for those links! Thats EXACTLY what I was looking for! I think I may have already checked your project too (if its the one you made on another thread, where your using sliders to control all the different physical features, and the skin tones)!

I think its about time I adopted a hi-poly/low-poly workflow. I've made a few simple characters now, but with all of them, the approach I used was to simply have one lowpoly model, then unwrap the UV's, paint the textures & other maps in Photoshop, test them in 3D using 3 Point Shader, and thats it. I know it will add a lot more work to do it the other way but some of these sculpted hi-poly characters look amazing! I need to learn about baking normal maps rather than just using X-normal to create them from my diffuse!

Cheers

darthwilson

Facial features were controlled via the morph targets being plugged into an animset.. Colours all through shader parameters.