[Hair] Need help with a long, stylized ponytail of Sailor Moon

Hi,

I’m going crazy already, so I would appreciate some tips and help :smiley:

How do I approach a ponytail like this (the yellow one)? I want to get the same shape but made of hair (on the right).

Is there any other way than to create multiple, very precise guides defining the shape? Something like “create along the surface” (shrinkwrap does not work ;)), or “contain inside the mesh”? :smiley:

I will be very grateful for any tips, tutorials, anything that would help me push this forward:)

Use a cluster of small curve circles as the Bevel Object in the guide hairs settings. This is one object. Arrange the curve circles into a rectangular shape - like the top of the ponytail.
Turn on Proportional Editing, with the Connected Only option ticked, select the bottom point in the curve guide and use Alt-S to scale down the guide and hairs to a point.

Thanks for your answer.

I’ve tried to figure out what you said, but unfortunately to no avail. :confused:

I’m also confused about the rectangular shape, as there is nothing like that in the ponytail. So there must be some misunderstanding :slight_smile:

Just to give more details:

I don’t want to make stylized hair, but normal hair like in my previous character:

I just want to shape it like the yellow mesh, without having to do it manually, especially grooming hair by hair, as it does seem to be that precise.

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Hello

I assume your yellow lock is made of quads… in that case you can use Shortest Edge Paths to create the guide curves. You can manually set the end and start vertex groups.

Good example on how to make edge paths follow geometry here:

you can do it without the dual mesh as that isn’t necessary in your case.

There are some hoops you need to jump through to use these curves as guides for interpolated hair…
It’ll have to be attached to a UV-unwrapped base mesh (the head) and have the following settings:

and then you need surface_uv_coordinate attribute stored…

Going to sleep now and working tomorrow so hope you can figure out the details.

Good luck!

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The top end of the ponytail is rectangular…

Make a rectangular cluster / group of curve circles…

Rectangle of circles

Make them more random than in my quick example.

Apply the circles as the shape the hair is made of,…

Strand cluster used as Bevel Object

Scale down the radius of the guide curve, using Alt-S to scale, and with proportional editing turned on…

You get a ponytail with many strands. I have left the strands big enough to be easily seen. You will want the individual strands far smaller…

If you use GeoNodes to make the circle cluster then you can make the cluster ‘animated’ along the length of the original curve. Then you can add the area where the individual hairs separate a lot more, near the bottom of the ponytail.

I think this tutorial for Stylized Hair is one of the best…

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Currrrrrrrves.
I mean, yeah, still manual, but you don’t need a lot of them.

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Thank you all for your suggestions and tutorials! I have a lot to watch and read! :smiley:

GN “Hair from Curve” combines @stray’s method with integration I mentioned with new curves system so you can use cycles hair BSDF and other hair modifiers.

hair stuff.blend (899.5 KB)

A single curve is used as input and strands are placed on a surface. Global cycles/eevee curves settings apply.

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