7 Steps to Effective 3D Hair Creation

When creating realistic 3d characters, one of the big challenges is how to create realistic and natural characters’ hair. I’m sure you’ve been struggling with how to draw the 3D hair of your character model. Creating hair is one of the most frustrating things for many modelers. Hair is really a difficult part of the modeling process. Mainly, it is very energy consuming. Of course, a large part of people are not skilled enough to master the skills. So if you can find a more convenient and less time-consuming way is a very urgent thing. Today let’s talk about how to create realistic hair for your game character.

• What software to operate in

You can create models of 3D hair in some 3d modeling software. For this project, we will mainly operate in Blender. As you know, Blender is a powerful and versatile 3D modeling software with a wide range of tools. Moreover, it is also free to use, which is particularly friendly to some freelancers. There are several processes to be followed.

• Collecting references

First of all, we need to collect hair of people that we can refer to. There are various pictures of hairstyles on the internet, sometimes you can find pictures of different angles of a hairstyle, that is certainly good news for you. You can choose a hairstyle that you like and analyze it. The goal, of course, is to get a clearer picture of the characteristics of the hair flow and so on. Different character hairstyles have different lengths of hair in different parts of it, the degree of bending and the direction of combing. So if you can get more deeply familiar with the hair, it will help you a lot when creating 3D hair later.

• Generating hair particles.

Hair type particles are a subset of regular particles. Hair system forms curves that can represent hair, bristles, grass and bristles. In the particle system, you need to drive to make the hair, as well as the physical simulation. Then into the sexual texture baking, the information on the high-precision model is recorded on top of the mapping.

• Preparing hair cards

Demonstrate how to prepare hair cards and organize your work. Create hair cards and place each of them on a different layer. After creating so layers and adding path morphs to all strands, you are ready to start working with hair.

• Combing the 3D hair

Start with the first strand, covering most of the scalp, remembering the flow of the hair. Don’t worry. You won’t get it perfect from the start, but having strands in the spline will make it easier to correct it later. Continue with the rest of the strands until you achieve the desired result.

As a combing process goes on over time, here I will give you some advice on how to place your cards at different stages.

• Optimizing the hair grid

In this step, start optimizing your hair mesh. In the case, the number of triangles is reduced from 40K to 20K without losing much quality, and you can push it higher.

• Inserting and setting materials

Finally I will show you how to insert and set materials in Unreal Engine 4.

If after the above process you are not quite sure how to do it, or if you still have some doubts about 3D hair modeling, I highly recommend you to check out this tutorial. In this course, the lecturer will introduce you to the workflow of creating realistic real-time hair for your game character. You will learn how to create and mask realistic real-time hair for your character in a game or real-time engine, how to insert and set up materials in Unreal Engine 4, and how to easily optimize your hair mesh.

After completing this course, you will have gained the basic knowledge needed to create 3D hair for real time characters. All the basics and techniques are universal for different types of hair. They will help you to take your game character art to the next level and make your works look more believable. In addition, the entire model is created with free software, so it’s really a good choice for freelancers.

If you want to learn more tips on creating 3D hair for game characters, come and join Wingfox. If you join now, there is a class purchase benefit for you. When you want to buy a course, copy and paste this promo code:

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