Example of Hairstyle
Below I will show you some examples for some of the hairstyles shown in the first picture. I have chosen a different hairstyle than the one Varga has because it would have been boring for me to use the same hairstyle to make this tutorial :)
The first hairdo (normal1) is the usual one... I will not spend so much time on it because you probably can find a lot of tutorials about it on the internet. In a few words you will map a texture like the one below on some geometry extruded from the skull like in the figure below and then tweak the shape of the hair by moving the vertices around.
For this tutorial i will go with a more interesting hairstyle.
Tools Used
For the entire project i used Maya as 3d application, Photoshop for texture painting and mudbox for high res. For the hair i used Maya paint effects a lot in the past ... now I like to paint the hair in Photoshop, it gives me more freedom and variation using custom brushes and a little more time. You can customize some paint effects brushes in Maya to do the trick and I will show you later how to do it.
Painting the Hair Texture
The most important thing when painting hair textures with alpha is the alpha channel (basically the transparency map). You should put more effort in painting the form and irregularities of hair strands and then concern about light and shadow in the diffuse texture. I will nail down two approaches for painting the alpha for the hair:
- Maya Paint Effects
- Photoshop
Maya Paint Effects
The first approach that I used a lot in the past and did the job well is using Maya paint effects. With a little effort and a few hours of work you can make some pretty good fx brushes for painting hair ,I have a few custom ones done by myself but I will start from a basic one to show you the process.
This is Maya paint effects canvas:
Click on the brush presets icon and the visor will pop up. From the paint effects tab inside visor choose the "hair" folder and then the most saturated red hair there like in the picture below. You can play with other presets as you like but this one is best suited for what I need.
If you are using a wacom tablet you can map the pen pressure to different attributes of the brush in the paint effects tool settings dialog.
|
|
|
