Hello, I looked around and couldn’t really find anything, but is there a way to make lines in a round hair mesh with a shader that looks like semi-realistic hair? I’m going for a Breath of the Wild art style, kinda cartoony and realistic at the same time, so I made my hair from a UV sphere. But I’m wondering if there is a way to make a shader that gives the hair smooth lines so it still looks roundish, but actually like hair? This is what my hair looks like,
(https://i.stack.imgur.com/KJ5Ox.jpg
Still not quite finished the basic shape, but I would like to add a shader for the texture. I’m not very good with shaders so I don’t really know how to play around with them, I tried some basic textures shaders but they didn’t look good 
Thanks in advance!
I think anisotropic option in the principle bsdf should help here. This video will show a bit more… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2XjdzzWCqI
You could try something like this…of course you might need to change some coordinates, like change from linier to spherical for the gradient texture and mapping might need to change axis ( to fit your set-up).
Thanks, I actually changed my hair style to make the video’s a bit more as well haha, it’s a really good video!
Wow, thanks for the shader! I need to play around with the settings a bit, but I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong haha, here’s what I have,
Would you be able to tell me what I could change? It looks somewhat okay, but the back and the front have circular swirls, i tried changing some rotations and scales in the mapping but didn’t get much results…
The swirls are from the hair being modeled from a sphere… and it does look like you UV’ed it into sections. I took a look at a way to apply this to a model created like this…and it looks like mesh joined together with no seams, and UV it following active quad works best…if you don’t like this way then one thing you can do is arrange this on a plane, add an ortho camera with square size 1024x1024 or so and arrange it to fit the plane…render it and save…then use the image created as an imported texture.
Here is the active quad example…
Oh okay, how do I make it follow active quads? I tried and it just jumps out of the UV. Sorry, I’m still fairly new to Blender
No Problem…
Did you Join all, and remove any seams?
If so…in edit, select one face then hit A for all, that will make one face the active quad ( try to pick one that is as rectangular as possible, yield better resulting UV). Then hit U and select from active quad…if you mean jumps out of the box in the UV editor…that is OK…doesn’t matter as it is a generated texture any way…if you go the route of saving the texture as an image, then you can just select under the UV tab, constraine to image bounds…( Load the image first!! )
Okay, I actually got it looking very nice! Thank you very much for the help!
Glad I could help!
Happy Blending!