Little backstory, I’m 19 and have been modeling on-and-off with Blender for the past 6 years doing small simple models here and there and never really got serious with using Blender until a few (2-3) months ago when my friend decided he wanted to code a game and have me model all of the assets. This wasn’t much a problem until I started working on characters and quickly realized I had no idea how to do hair. So after searching for a while and only finding particle related hair rendering tutorials I eventually came across this video:
that showed how to use curves for modeling cartoony hair. I really enjoyed how simple it was to create hair in a matter of minutes using curves over painstakingly modeling hair from a cylinder and manually moving each edge loop around until it resembled hair. However as pretty as the method above is, it is not video game friendly. Down below I have a picture of the hair I modeled, weighing in at a hefty 19,891 polygons:
Now the most simplest thing I can do is convert the curves into a mesh and apply a Decimate modifier to bring down the poly count to a more acceptable count such as 1,150 like so:
But upon closer inspection I notice there are many areas where the mesh could be improved to have a much lower polygonal count (around 300 less polygons) and I could spend an hour or two restructuring the mesh manually to bring it down to a lower count but I feel that there is another way of making similiar looking hair without needing to apply a Decimate modifier and manually restructuring the mesh. Do you guys have any tips to share for creating low poly hair out of curves?
Andis there any way to lower the amount of vertext’s a curve’s bevel’s edge loop has? Example of what I’m talking about:
