Working with hair

I’ve never been very good at making hair do what I want, so I’m testing the slow, laborious, but much more controlled “One guide hair at a time” method. This could work for me, but there’s either something I don’t know, or a limitation, and I’m hoping for help.

If you are adding hair to a human head, you choose the number of segments. All well and good, but the segments are spaced equidistant along the hair. Is there a way (without manually subdividing control points) to get more detail towards the roots, which would then enable a subtle lift at the roots without the character looking like they’ve stuck their finger in a mains socket?

E.G. have less space between the selected control points to allow finer control at the roots?


No, I don’t think so. The default segments will always be even spaced and if you re-key any strand, they will be even spaced as well. So yeah, doing a manual subdivide I think is your only option.

Personally I’ve not found it to be an issue, the segments will curve, movement near the root is usually very minimal and the Deflect emitter distance can be used to Comb the hair while still keeping it near the surface, if that’s what you want.

Thanks. It’s kinda what I’m after. As an example reference, one of Jennifer Aniston’s hairstyles has more lift on one side and almost none on the other. The lifted side is fine, but the almost none is more of an issue to have some lift without intersecting the mesh.


In some ways it’s almost impossible to not have some strands intersecting the mesh, but assuming a still pose image, you can hide any of that with the top layers.

So a couple of pointers, 1. don’t try to do it all with just one particle system, a full hair style will likely have a good half dozen or more actual hair particle systems, all adding specific shape/fill and volume.
2. in some cases you’ll want to use more ‘control hairs’ but then use the Simple method (with it’s radius around 1) for the child hairs. This can give more control and help to limit any mesh intersecting compared to the Interpolate method, which will spread the hairs out more over the place.