Polygonal Hair: Modelling and Materials Techniques

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Polygonal Hair: Modelling and Materials Techniques

Postby Jedah85 » Fri Apr 19, 2013 7:34 am

Hi! I'm quite new in the forum, but have been using this awesome piece of software for quite a long time, I just find the current version to be really exciting (specially the current Nighrly Build) and am trying to make a game using Blender and Unity.

Well, that intro was to explain that the last few days I've been trying to find a good technique to create polyonal hair to my main character and wanted to share it with this comunity ^^
Particles hair look awesome and the easiest to make and handle, but only if you are making still images, not animations.
I've been reading tons of tutorials and tips concerning polygonal hair, and this is how I am making it now (maybe I'd change the technique in the future, if any of you have better ideas).

First of all, you'll need two Blender's plugins:

Multi Extrude Plus

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Multi_Extrude
Author(s): macouno, Liero, meta-androcto

Armature from Mesh
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?227219-armature-from-edge-loops
Author: Liero

1. Select, Duplicate, and move to another layer the scalp
Image
2. Select a zone from the hair to grow (you can do the entire hair at once, but I prefer doing it by "zones") duplicate and separate it
Image

3. Multi Extrude. You can tweak the variables as much as you like, I prefer leaving them in 0, exept for "Offset" "Scale" and "Repeat" to control its lenght. Also note that the Repeat is what later will give you the possibility to change its shape
Image
4. Select the tip of your "hairs" (probably already selected if you didn't touch anything after las step) and click "create armature"

5. Ready! You now have your hair with the armatures, ready to shape it as you please. As easy to use as particles, isn't it?
Image

6. Some more tweaking to make it look better, adjust the width and apply sub-surf (I like a lvl 2 one)
Image

A render:

Image
Lastly I'd like to discuss the techniques to materialice or texturing it, these are the settings I use:
Image
But I don't like it very much :-/ any better idea?

I found the one on this site: http://www.mark13.org/blender/hair-material to be really cool, but even after using the same settings as the example it doesn't look like that one :-(
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Re: Polygonal Hair: Modelling and Materials Techniques

Postby duststorm » Fri Apr 19, 2013 3:42 pm

If you intend to model hair fit for realtime purposes you can have a look here: http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique

I would not extrude the the head topology directly to model hair, but instead duplicate a scalp and start from there, or model the hair polygons from scratch around the head.

If you intend to do raytraced hair only, maybe you could try the new cycles hair.
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Re: Polygonal Hair: Modelling and Materials Techniques

Postby Jedah85 » Sat Apr 20, 2013 6:29 am

duststorm wrote:I would not extrude the the head topology directly to model hair, but instead duplicate a scalp and start from there, or model the hair polygons from scratch around the head.


I did that, in the first step o.O
Jedah85 wrote:1. Select, Duplicate, and move to another layer the scalp


duststorm wrote:If you intend to model hair fit for realtime purposes you can have a look here: http://wiki.polycount.com/HairTechnique


Thank you for the link! I get it now, using planes instead of polygons and using diffuse, specular, normal and alpha maps to texturixe it. I'll try that and show the results ^^
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Re: Polygonal Hair: Modelling and Materials Techniques

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Mon Aug 12, 2013 4:32 pm

What plugin(s) are replacing multi-extrude? It's no longer on the blender repository....
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