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
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
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
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?
6. Some more tweaking to make it look better, adjust the width and apply sub-surf (I like a lvl 2 one)
A render:
Lastly I'd like to discuss the techniques to materialice or texturing it, these are the settings I use:
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