The many Hairs of my younger self.

The BANE of my existence.

Yeah. Dynamics.

So why the heck do I insist on using them?




I made my 'little girl' character a while back to put in a scene with Henry, the African elephant I made.  I hope to have an entry about specific rigging techniques I used for Henry, but for now...the girls freaking hair.

I wanted to use myself (a much younger self) as a reference.

Everyone say "AAAAAWWWWWWWWWWW".

Okay, whatever. I'm still ginger.  Now when I first made her, I wanted to use hair.  I knew I wanted it short, so I rigged up fur that is controlled by hair particles. I should never have done that.  While it moves and floes more realistically, it was very  hard to control. She looked like a monkey.  Even though I made the geometry of her body a rigid body so it couldnt pass through, it still did, making it look like some kind of Curly thing from the Three Stooges (original please, I'm not touching this 'remake' with a 10-foot pole).  The result is....yeah...

No.


I'm not putting that on a modeling/texturing/dynamics reel.  No way!  Solution: Game Hair. Now why didn't I think of that in the first place?

I love painting textures in ZBrush and Photoshop.  The girl's face is painted entirely in ZBRush. Even Henry is sculpted and painted in ZBrush. Henry took about 2-3 hours a day for 2 months to do.  For the girl, I painted a patch of hair in Photoshop, threw it on an alpha card, and sculpted her hair out of alpha cards. SO MUCH EASIER. Genius.  Here's one of the links I used as a tutorial:

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

The other one I used, which went into more detail about what custom brushed and painting techniques to use in Photoshop, I forgot to bookmark like an idiot.  But if you google "paint hair" and "Photoshop" you'll get tons of references. Just use whatever will help  you most for the project you are trying to accomplish.

Well, here is the final product: