I’ve spent so much time trying to make realistic hair on blender- I’ve tried UV mappin, plain texturing and particles- but none of them look quite right-
would anyone be able to help me? perhaps refer me to a tutorial or just tell me whats best n how to do it right?
check out a tut by Landis in “works in Progress”
search for fuzzy peach
hope that helps 
lilo
What’s the hair for? Is it for an animal or a person? Depending on the length, style, and amount of hair, different techniques might fit your needs better.
-i was doing shoulder length hair because i was only doing the head…
Ripsting’s fibre script will probably be a big help for you. Failing that, you might use the technique described in Landis’ Operation Peach Fuzz… just with longer planes.
Are you looking to have straight hair or curly hair or dreadlocked hair or something else?
I recently also spent a lot of time trying out various methods. Here a pic of the best I could do (part way completed)
I made a UV mapped subsurfed strip bent into a U shape so that it had some width from all viewing angles. Here is a link to the alpha map that I used for the texture.
It’s a very tedious process – hope this helps.
Great result, GreyBeard!
Having followed the threads mentioned above & done a bit of Googling I found this:
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/index.html
It’s Lightwave specific but it talks in polygons & subsurfs & expands on the ‘card method’ outlined in Landis’ ‘Operation Peach Fuzz’ thread.
It should be reasonably understandable if you’ve read the other threads.
Sort of explains Greybeard’s pics as well.
Cheers
C
There is something to be careful of if you decide to use the card technique. I posted a question about it in my Fulcrum thread here:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=157390#157390
Basically (for those of you too lazy to hit the link), I have each card as an individual object with regular (Orco) texture mapping. However, if I want to join all my hair cards into a single mesh that I can control with an armature, the texture gets applied to the whole joined mesh rather than each individual card.
If anyone has any cool ways to get around this, I’d be more than grateful. Hell, I’ll travel to where ever you live, shake your hand, and give you a cookie.
You could use Sticky coords or UV coords.
Martin
Thanks! I’ll definitely try that out.
Well crap… making sticky on all the cards and then setting the mapping on the material to Stick gives me a beautiful… blank render. I have the alpha set to zero so I can use the texture’s alpha. When I bring the alph back to 1, the card renders, but it renders black… no texture. It’s almost as if I mapped the texture somewhere else.
I’m thinking about trying UV mapping each card. However, I can’t seem to find a way to copy my UV mapping from one mesh to another… is there a way to do this that I don’t know about, or am I stuck mapping each card individually (and identically)?
I suppose the other way to do it would be to keep everything as-is and just set up vertex groups for each card in such a way that they will still deform properly when parented to the armature. It’d be a bit like adjusting weights by hand… a bitch to tweak, but it might just work.
Any idea which is the better solution?
[quote=“GreyBeard”]
quote]
wow! cool! PM me some as you go along, it looks really good!
Feeb: If the meshes all share the same data (if they are instanced copies), they share the same UV coords. Strange that sticky didn’t work though.
Martin
That’s the problem, I think. I didn’t make instance copies… I made real copies (Shift+D). Now what do I do?
Select all copies and make sure one of them is the active object.
Ctrl-L
Mesh Data
Martin
Well… that worked… kind of. I’m sure everyone’s getting sick of this, but I have to find a solution. The texture got applied to each card and UV textures do indeed maintain themselves after a join. Unfortunately, however, by linking the mesh data, all of the work I’ve spent editing, placing, and sizing the cards to fit the main mesh properly goes away as each instance of the card inherits the active mesh’s shape.
I’m gathering that I’m probably going to have go and do this by hand. My mistake for not starting with UV textures… a mistake I’m sure I’ll learn from. However, I wonder if a script could be written to copy UV coordinates from one mesh to another mesh with the same number of faces. I glanced at the python api documentation, but nothing jumped out at me. If anyone could point me in the right direction, I’d be more than grateful (I’m not afraid of a little code).
Until then, I’ll start mapping each card by hand. Again, thanks everyone for all your help.
Copying the UVs through Python is trivial is they have the mesh data is identical (same number of faces and of vertice is each faces).
I vaguely remember doing such a script and posting it here for someone, if you can’t find it, I’ll take 10 mins tomorrow and redo it.
Martin
Was it this one? If it is, sweet… I’ll jump on it in the morning (well… later in the morning… after I go to bed and wake back up). If not, I appreciate your help and will be immensely thankful if you took the time to write that script (or point me to some references if you don’t happen to have 10 minutes 
).
Again, thank you so much.
