I’ve been playing with the Jahka hair particles patch. I’m using an Ubuntu 7.04 system on AMD dual-core. My Blender is SVN 2007-05-28 (with the Jahka hair particles patch, of course).
Some initial playing and getting over the learning curves, and now I’d have to give this a rating of WOW! Jahka’s my new personal hero. He’s off vacationing somewhere right now, but when he gets back: GOOD WORK! This is EXACTLY what I’ve been waiting for in hair control for three years. This is GOOD WORK.
The only functionality I’m using of this patch is the static particles with add, comb, cut, grow. I’ve created a “hair hat” for her head which I don’t let the particles intersect, which simulates the hair growing out of her head, then being combed into its final spots.
First is a high clumpiness factor, which makes for what looks like a very, very styled look, like you might see in some magazines:
The only difference in the above two is the pose of the head, actually. The hair colour changes because it’s too reflective, and the light shining on it at a different angle makes it appear a completely different colour. Oops.
That was all well and good, but is pretty cliche in the hair world. None of the hairs are close to the head, the clumpiness means you don’t have to really style the hair carefully for a realistic look.
So next up, I really worked hard, creating six distinct hair hats for her, two for bangs, two for main part of head, and two for sideburns (I don’t think the sideburns are any good yet, they’re mainly there just so I won’t forget to keep working on them):
The above hair styles (on the left two girls - the renders differ only in the lighting setup) are remarkable simply because they DO NOT LOOK REMARKABLE. That’s the beauty of them. Creating that simply normal hairstyle before was a huge pain in the ass. Now it’s a breeze to make hair that lays down like actual hair on an actual human.
The hairstyle on the right is simply to show how easy it is to get traditional “windblown hair.” It took me maybe 3-5 minutes of combing the hair into a different position.
This is a huge leap forward in hair control. I really hope these patches make it into Blender proper, because they are great.
Everyone: enjoy.