Notes on pologonal hair Locate hair references:
Let’s try and think of modeling the hair in simple planes ...
In photoshop ...
Make a new brush 64x64 Soft airbrush, dissolve, 4% opacity
clean up and blur
Define as brush and reduce spacing to 1%
Note on the skin – reflection We will be adding a falloff with raytrace map to the reflection slot at a low level – about 5% ... [showing at 25% here in this test] ... for now it slows down renders. Perpendicular/Parallel or Fresnel will depend on the lighting setup. Here, Perpendicular/Parallel does a nice job of opening up shadows thanks to side lighting. For now just turn off the raytracing to keep renders fast.
This hair thickness looks good close up but not far away ... we are going to have to paint to scale [paint at 100% of the expected view]
An attempt to get 2 layers of color going with a blend map
Base color is the dark brown
2nd layer is a blonde color with the one opacity map in different slots
Set hair to not cast shadows and give it self-illumination
Set up 2x1 aspect ratio hair planes to match 512x1024 hair art Set points to match the poly
Match set volume
Model using FFD
Work from some reference
You will need 4 colors: 1 Hi-light 2 midtones 1 shadow or dark base color Start with filing the canvas with a dark base color for the hair. Digital art cheat on hair This works if you have straight 1x2 planes that you will distort not too much. Fill with 50% gray, add noise, then extreme motion blur
If you run into moire problems, supersample maps ... it is slow, to do as a last resort.
Easier to just change the dimensions of the map ... here I scaled it down in PSD 50%
For tips of hair make gradient mask
save/use mask as a selection and invert
Fill art using this selection with black
Increase levels on the entire layer towards white
oops – invert
Make black lines at the top and bottom to get rid of any transparency issues
Layer on the planes
A working strategy for modeling the hair shapes: 1. make the head the transform coordinate system, and 2. sometimes use preserve uvs and sometimes not, in the latter case you can sculpt the hair. 3. start out with ffd but collapse them and work the usual way after basic masses are established 4. work in gray polygons to avoid getting lost in details – block out the masses first, looking at overlaying placement, hair shapes that support character personality, etc.
UVW each clump of hair over the turbosmooth. Paint using the 64x64 adobe hair brush. The files should be 512x512 or 512x256. This shows only
the opacity map to start.
Go back to the method of laying out 1x2 planes and shaping them. This time only use turbosmooth and not ffd. Limit the amount of modeling to not stretch the map.
this sample is 512x1024 with multiple sharpens
When painting and using smudge, set the strength to pressure
Save the opacity selection as alpha 1. Bring the map into max as a targa so the instanced opacity slot pick up the alpha channel.
Turbosmooth 3. Supersample the map.
Step 1 Start with dark base color. With soft hair brush, make hair. Lighter at top then the bottom. Root at very top is also dark. Sometimes use soft light mode, usually use normal.
Step 2 Add another layer with 3 pixel hard brush using both brush and smudge mode set to strength.
Step 3 Add specular ...use a 3 pixel hard brush with a lighter color ... maybe increase the saturation
Step 4 Mutant hairs are handles by brushing backwards “into” the hair and increasing the steps setting to 15-45 to make the lines fade.
Step 5 This shows adding another layer of painting with soft light. Strengthen the sense of depth with dark and light strokes.
Work on your quick mask, make a selection, then save nad resave over your alpha channel and save as targa.
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