I’ve been trying to model a character in an N64 style for a while now and I have been stuck in the hair for a while now. I tried modeling with the curve method but it hasn’t really worked out too much unfortunately, it might just be how I’m approaching it. I’m thinking about modeling the hair by card modeling but I’m not sure if that would mesh well with a N64 style especially since it’s a spikey haired character. I wanted to know if there are any tutorials catering to this particular thing? Preferably something more in depth.
This is what I’m trying to model. I have a picture of the side and back view somewhere too I just don’t quite have the time to find it at the moment.
I personally would do it like this (which is, more or less, exactly how they did it in the PS1 era):
Start with a triangle (an icosphere makes that simple)
Extrude
Loop cut
Scale down with Proportional Editing on
Merge the top three vertices with M
Rotate
Repeat for each strand
2 Likes
This is probably the most different answer I got so far. (It’s actually very refreshing) I’ll have to see about giving this a try when I get home.
1 Like
The other nice part about using an icosphere is that, more or less, the triangles follow the natural shape of the skull, which means your strands will start in the right place (this isn’t actually how hair grows but for low poly it’s close enough.) you can take just the upper half an icosphere, select a few random triangles out of it, (like 30-50%) delete the rest, and make strands from there, and they will already have the correct starting orientation 
I would also recommend switching your reference images to something more like this - if you want a retro low poly look, use retro low poly reference you can see here that Cloud has a lot less strands overall than your references, and they’re less detailed. A lot more of the form of the hair is “implied” vs explicitly drawn
1 Like
This is the method that a lot of people use for anime-style hair:
So I took your advice about bringing down the number of strands too so I did. Not as much in the front and even added a few on the sides But the back has been greatly reduced. I actually had success with this. The only thing I’m worried about is the weird shading in the front strand there but everything else was great! Thanks so much!
2 Likes
That looks really good, nice work! You can probably clear that shading up by turning on Auto Smooth for your hair object. If that doesn’t work, try a Weighted Normal modifier
1 Like