This is my first post on this forum, hi everyone!
This is my WIP model, her name is Keiko
I’d just like some feedback on her hair,
and also I’d like to ask what is the best way to texture it realistically? I’m new to making hair. It is just a mesh at the moment, nothing special.
Any help and feedback is appreciated thank you! 
Heres what I have with the hair so far… but I want it to look more realistic.
Could anyone help?
Hi,
I think particle system gives more realistic effect.
I know but I dont want to use particle hair
particle hair takes too much memory, btw how did u make the hair texture look like that
Yeah thats precisely why i dont want to use it. I am to use this character for a game eventually and particle hair wont work.
The texture? All I did was create a UV map of the hair mesh, then baked a texture map of it, opened that up in photoshop, changed the colours and put on overlay of a hair texture over the top and changed the layer type to Luminosity then saved it over the top of the old one and reloaded the UV image. Pretty simple. I can show you in more detail if that doesn’t make sense.
Thats probably not the ‘best’ way to do it, but it worked well for me.
The model is more realistic than a anime character. To create a anime model, you have to break away from the original topology of the realistic human. The chin isn’t narrow enough, the eyes aren’t big enough, and the nose, most of the time, is there but not realistic and non existent.
Nice set up with the hair by the way. To texture the hair properly, you must import the hair texture as a PNG file.
hello sooshicat, nice char going. 
You can try this method, after UV mapping one hair strand.
Add a material, Check Transparency Z- trans then make alpha to zero, add the hair texture as texture, set Mapping to UV, Check Alpha in influence tab. The texture must be in PNG like what XeroShadow said to enable transparency.
@XeroShadow
Well it’s not strictly an anime character Think more like Final Fantasy XIII type rather than traditional drawn anime. Thanks for the tips though!
@kaisaki1342
I wanted to make the ends of the hair more transparent to make it more realistic… I couldn’t get transparency to work was because as you and XeroShadow said, it needs to be png, but my file was a tif
Thanks so much guys!
EDIT: Changed my hair file to a .png and when I paint an area black for transparency it doesn’t come up transparent, it just shows up as if the hair is coloured black. Could it be because I baked the texture? Hrmmm… I might try and re-do the whole texture exactly how Kaisaki said and see how that goes, and while I’m at it, i’ll fix up the parts of the hair that don’t align in the right direction, like the bottom right ends texture is sort of sideways haha
Okay so I re-did it, and it was working out pretty well, so I did a transparency test (just erased a bunch of it and saved again)
Expecting that the bits I erased would render transparent.
Well… it didn’t go how I expected.
It seems that there is some transparency if you look closely, but something has gone seriously wrong…
Can anyone point me in the right direction? I must be doing something wrong?
In the 3D viewer window, with GLSL texture shading it shows transparent how i thought it would, but without GLSL it is just little white sprays everywhere, and when its rendered it shows this horrible thing below!
EDIT:: Somehow… checking the “Premultiply” box in the uv editor (I was clicking things randomly in frustration lol) fixes this?
This is where I learn it: http://vimeo.com/7508405
I hope this help, for the technique I use to make the hair I need to make only 1 strand, UV map it to the image and material and add image texture on the texture tab.
Then just like the video i just duplicate it as another mesh. Later I just join all of the strand created.
So for it to work I think you will need to redo the hair mesh.
Hmmmm thats a good tutorial, I don’t really feel like redoing my mesh cause it took a long time, so i will continue with how i am going and then if it turns out bad i will do it that way.
Thank you everyone
Try to make the hair more smoother
@3DUnlimited
I am currently working on a better texture for it with transparency which will make it look smoother. I will post when done
Hello all,
Here is my current progress. As you can see there are still a few errors and dark spots and areas that are way too transparent still, but i’m working on it!
And I havent shaded it properly yet so its all pretty much one colour but i will fix that too.
Front:
Back: (look at that transparency!)
Sooshicat - I think the transparency issue is with the way you did the hair texture.
try painting the hair texture (in any image editor program you use) using brush with no opacity as the base layer. Then add another layer on top of it there you can draw the hair as usual.
Nice render, kinda reminds me of the cutscenes in Final Fantasy. Just a question though. You said that you are going to use it in a game, wouldn’t rigging the hair for animation be a bit more difficult?
@Irene Smith
Thats exactly the look I was going for
It’s a short hairstyle so I don’t plan to animate it much, maybe only the long bangs at the front so I don’t think it would be too difficult (hopefully hahah) I am more concerned with movement animations for the character than the hair to be honest, its the least of my worries. For the moment I am just working on making it look good
How is it looking now
