There are 3 different methods I'll quickly gloss over here before I dive into the fourth method which I personally like to use, to get us started lets talk about the slowest and most painful way I know :)
Dunno why, seems odd to me but make sure to have good uvs :) However, I also highly recommend attempting to sculpt your hairstyle first as this will help you understand the flow of the clumps and this will be very helpful when placing your first guides.Īlso, make sure that your base model has good UV's since many workflows require the use of ptex maps to drive attributes and one of the quirks of maya is that the UV's of the model are still required to create ptex. Obviously looking for reference is the first thing you need to do like with the rest of everything we do in CG, wigs can sometime be helpful to find as they are often advertised with multiple angles which is sometimes very hard to find with hair. Hair is difficult and for me there is no doubt about that, there are so many subtleties and transitions to hair that make creating convincing hairstyles incredibly difficult, so planning is very important here! Not really much else to say here, just remember to consider having stray hair in your groom :)
When creating your hair it's also pretty important to make sure you get stray hairs too unless the style of your character specifically requires perfect hair. This structure is incredibly important to creating a believable groom for your characters!Īlso, very well explained by flipped normals hair sculpting tutorial which has a great breakdown and probably explains this much better than I just did so I heavily recommend viewing it! Sub clumps (number of sub clumps depends on wetness of the hair). By this I mean all the levels of clumping are not isolated, you could image it like this: Second thing to keep in mind is that hairstyles have a very clear hierarchy of clumping and overall structure and every branch in this hierarchy is contained by its parent (apart from strays). You should try to keep all of this on your mind when placing your hair guides, try to make sure the density of guides is higher in these regions. The reason this is worth remembering is that a vast majority of hairstyles have varied hair length and many typically male hairstyles have shorter hair on the back and sides. The length of the hair can also describe the size of the of the top-level clumping (I'll come back to this in a sec) so basically longer hair forms larger, much more visible clumps and shorter hair produces smaller clumps as you would expect. It's really difficult to find any research on why and how hair clumps the way it does - if you exclude research on hair products and oils that "enhance" clumping - so everything i'm gonna say is based on observation and conversations with people in the industry.įirst off, the intensity of clumping effects correlate with how dry/oily/wet the hair is so keep this in consideration when shading or thinking about your character, if they haven't showered in a while chances are their hair will have pretty heavy clumping. I'd argue that this is the most important attribute of hair when creating your groom to create something that feels really convincing.