Making a decent hair-do

[wavez]

I’m trying to make a decent looking hair-do for a girl with long straight hair. The new guide curve features in Blender work really well for short hair, but unfortunately, not so well for long hair. The main issue is that the guide curve shape is copied and used for each hair. Again, this is fine for short hair, good even, but for long hair it can be a problem because long hair falls around the head, and covers the hair beneath it, creating layers. Here is a simplified situation so you can see what I mean:

The hair on top is not reaching out far enough and falling into the layer beneath it, while the layers beneath are jumping out too far.

We could try to create multiple guide curves for the different layers, or just make the top layer too thick to see that there aren’t any layers underneath. Both are tricky. Another difficult aspect of human hair is creating the part where the hair separates. Idealy, we should be able to separate the hair down a line and have the hair on each side go different directions, and still hide the scalp. With influence spheres like we have now, it is a little tricky. In this next picture, you can see that I’ve placed the spheres of each side so that they overlap a little bit, and stagered them from front to back to cover as much area as possible. I like this better because it hides the scalp, but it also creates hairs that are blended between the two curves and end up looking like frizzy hairs (which look good too, if that’s the look you want).

The problem with these frizzy hairs is that they go just as far down as any of the other hairs following the guides, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your character.

I could go more in depth, but I’m not going to because it’s pretty late as I am writing this. Here are my two failed attempts at creating long straight human hair:

In these pictures, the hair is being grown from another mesh object inside the visible mesh.

In this next image, I separated the mesh that the hairs are growing from where the part is, so that I didn’t get any of the frizzy type hairs. I tried to bring these hairs together at the surface but they just don’t like to follow orders.

I think it would be good if we had some more features to help us better control hair, and especially long hair like this. I’d also like it if anyone with some good results in this area could post pics here and tell me how you did it.

I’ll let you know if I’m able to make improvements later.

[wavez]

Here is an improvement I made (just after posting) to the parting. Setting MinDist to be the same as MaxDist on the curves at the edges of the part gives me this:

[Sinistar]

I think you can try MakeHair (a sub project of MakeHuman):
https://www.makehuman.org
(or: https://projects.blender.org/projects/makeh/)

[alabandit]

If you not in a rush you could wait for the next alpha release, the make orange progect has made some major improvements to the way particles are rendend. head over their if you want to see what they been up to. alternitively you could try compiling the CVC for your self but it’s up to you i quess (and your scedual).

[DwarvenFury]

If you’re on Windows, you can try this testbuild here: http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7415

The particle guides have seen some major improvements in the past week or two.

I’ve had success with the guides by using one main guide to control the main direction of the hair flow, and using a few othe guides with Use MaxDist selected and then I play with the MaxDist value so those guides comb and draw my hair to make more of a hairstyle.

DwarvenFury

[wavez]

Hey guys. Ya, I’m using a binary I compiled from CVS on 11-12. I’d really encourage anyone who has made some nice looking long hair to post some pictures. Ultimately, I’d like to create something that will function for an animation. I’m not really interested in creating still images.