Is there a tutorial on making hair?

James

Is there a tutorial on making hair?

Gordig

What kind of hair? Mesh or strand-based?

Catherine3678ab

Yes there are a few -- check over on YouTube. Daz3D has a channel as do sevr

James

Gordig said:

What kind of hair? Mesh or strand-based?

Not sure.... I guess I'll try both

Richard Haseltine

Well, as an alternative way of asking, what do you want the end result to look like - that may affect which methods are suggested.

Willy2

The creation of the hairstyle is quite delicate. There are several creation methods.

There's the old fashioned way of using big tapered cylinders to simulate strands of hair. This method doesn't give good rendering results, but it is still used in some animated films when the characters are stylized.

There is the method of using very fine cylinders to simulate hair. Here we will use several hundred cylinders. This method is quite realistic but the files obtained are very large.

There is also another clever method which consists of using fairly wide planes (a few centimeters) which can overlap in some points. We will apply different textures depending on whether we want to represent more or less wide hair strand

Finally, there is another method consisting of using very narrow planes of a few millimeters.

Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I prefer the method that uses wide planes.
If you use planes to create a hairstyle, you will have different results depending on the rendering engine, because unlike cylinders, the planes overlap and are transparent in certain areas. Some rendering engines have difficulty handling this situation. Fortunately in DazStudio, the Iray rendering engine knows how to manage this complexity very well.

You can use Ornatrix software which will make your job easier, but some creators only work with their 3D software.

Moreover, these methods are constantly evolving. You may have noticed that for a very long time, the hairstyles sold by designers were mediocre and totally unrealistic. Fortunately, in recent years great progress has been made in this domain. Now, you can buy very realistic hairstyles that allow you to have very high quality renderings.

James

@Willly2 Heemm... so sophisticated. Never thought it would be that deep.
@Richard Hemmm... woman hair, probably neck length.

Willy2

Here are some good tutorials to get started (quite easy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8oxZSft_Ns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NUrh38cJBU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xir3sknEms

for alphas:

https://opengameart.org/content/hair-alphas-for-days