Cut a hairstyle to make it shorter?

Questionable Sanity

I bought Layered Fringe Hair (SKU 56271) because I really like how it looks from the neck up. The only issue I have is with the length of the hair. Unfortunately, the morph sliders for this hairstyle don't allow me to shorten the hair very much.

I've looked at shorter prefab hairstyles, and none of them have the look I want above the neck, so my only option is to take this long hairstyle and cut off everything below the neck. Does anyone know how I can do this and make it look half-decent?

fastbike1

Try unlocking Limits on the Sliders.

Questionable Sanity

I've tried that too. The hair does not scrunch up, but instead sticks out in bizarre directions.

chris-2599934

You could use the geometry editor to hide the longer parts of the hair, but the end result is unlikely to bear close scrutiny.

The only other alternative I can think of is that you do two shots - one with the hair at normal length, and one with no hair at all, then edit them together in post to get the effect you want.

Questionable Sanity

chris-2599934 said:

You could use the geometry editor to hide the longer parts of the hair, but the end result is unlikely to bear close scrutiny.

That was my first thought, and I had the same misgivings about it. Maybe if I also edit the texture files it could work...

EDIT: It does not work. The same parts of the texture file are used across different regions of the hair mesh, so it's impossible to make the long hair in back invisible without also affecting areas higher up.

chris-2599934 said:

The only other alternative I can think of is that you do two shots - one with the hair at normal length, and one with no hair at all, then edit them together in post to get the effect you want.

I'm not sure photoshopping two renders together would hold up under scrutiny either. Besides that, I plan to make a work consisting of a lengthy series of renders, and I'm not sure I have the patience to go through that process for every single one that this character is in.

fastbike1

@Questionable Sanity "I'm not sure photoshopping two renders together would hold up under scrutiny either. Besides that, I plan to make a work consisting of a lengthy series of renders, and I'm not sure I have the patience to go through that process for every single one that this character is in."

The you answer is find a different hair that looks like you want.

Questionable Sanity

fastbike1 said:

The you answer is find a different hair that looks like you want.

Leana

You can always try creating a morph for the hair yourself.

Questionable Sanity

Leana said:

You can always try creating a morph for the hair yourself.

I don't understand what that means, but I'm interested to hear more. I always prefer to frontload the work rather than fix it in post, whenever possible.

Leana

Questionable Sanity said:

EDIT: It does not work. The same parts of the texture file are used across different regions of the hair mesh, so it's impossible to make the long hair in back invisible without also affecting areas higher up.

I don't have that hair but depending on how the material zones are setup you may be able to get around that by creating multiple transmaps for the different surfaces, or using LIE to alter the transmap on some surfaces.

Questionable Sanity said:

Leana said:

You can always try creating a morph for the hair yourself.

I don't understand what that means, but I'm interested to hear more. I always prefer to frontload the work rather than fix it in post, whenever possible.

You would need to bring the hair in a modeller and alter it, then import the modified mesh as a morph with Morph Loader Pro. You could use the Hexagon bridge for that for example.

You can't remove any part of the mesh if you want it to work as a morph, only move the vertices, so it wouldn't be that easy, especially since that hair seems to have a lot of strands. But it's probably doable.

Questionable Sanity

Holy crap, I just tried the Geometry Editor on the hair in earnest, and I'm already impressed by the results! By lasso-selecting and hiding polygons, I can cut away any part of the hair I don't like. And if it looks a little too short, I can just invert which polygons are hidden, select the ones I want to add back on, then invert again to see the results.

This is only a first pass, and the bottom of the hair still has obvious polygonal jank, but just this amount of progress has given me a new surge of optimism. Plus, since I'm only hiding polygons and not deleting them, I can tweak the hidden polygons each time I shoot from an angle that doesn't look so great.

Leana said:

You would need to bring the hair in a modeller and alter it, then import the modified mesh as a morph with Morph Loader Pro. You could use the Hexagon bridge for that for example.

You can't remove any part of the mesh if you want it to work as a morph, only move the vertices, so it wouldn't be that easy, especially since that hair seems to have a lot of strands. But it's probably doable.

Yeah, I've already discovered that outright deleting portions of the hair mesh screws up the texture mapping. I guess that means merging vertices is out too.

Maybe if I pinch down the new ends of the strands into points, without actually merging the vertices, I can get a good result.