Blender 3.3 - New Hair Grooming System - The Pros and Cons

some languages came out with version 3.3 which came packed with this new hair grooming system in it and I wanted to test it out and put it against the old particle based hair system a few months back I was trying to learn the old particle-based hair system I was able to get these results in a matter of hours so let me try and remake one of them using the new hair system and see where it lacks and where it does in short a pros and cons list so that's what we are doing in this video before getting started though I highly recommend downloading the sample file that was released with the new version it has a lot of geometry notes based modifiers if I can call them that they act like add-ons that will help you replicate some of the effects you might have seen in the old hair system I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube and assumed that these modifiers were included by default in blender but they weren't they need to be appended into every project where you need them so go ahead and download that link will be in the description okay let's begin let's start with a quick demonstration of how to set this new hair system up and then take a brief look at all the tools that are at our disposal so to set it up you select the mesh and add an empty hair cuff with the Curve selected you go to sculpt mode and now you can actually start doing something with it press T to see all the tools on the left let's look at the add brush first starting with some important options just above it I think radius and count are pretty self-explanatory in the middle though there are two brush types available now the spherical brush type is a new feature I'm very bad at explaining technical things but to put it simply the projected brush treats all the hair that it sees is a two-dimensional plane and doesn't take the position in 3D space into consideration while the spherical brush knows what curves are closer to the cursor and makes changes based on that then in the curved shape drop down there are two important Fields first is length which determines the length of each curve this is the same as the length field in the old hair system and then points which determines how many points there will be on the curve which is there in the old hair particle system as well now you can add hair remove hair calm hair grow or Shrink hair these options were there in the old hair system as well but the density brush and the snake hook brushes are new in this version and I use them a lot throughout this experiment I'll show the Practical use when we get there in a minute before that let's look at those geometry notes based modifiers that came with the sample file to make them available in your project go to file then append then select the sample file go to node tree and then select everything and click on append next go to the modifiers tab with the Curve still selected add a geometry node modifier and from the drop down list you can select from the different options the Blended team made available through the sample character I'll start with the hair noise node this is pretty straightforward you increase the strength to increase the noise in there this is more similar to the roughness tab that you saw in the old hash system if you go into the geometric node setup you see a float curve node that you can use to define the shape of the noise which I think maps to the Kink option in the old hair system as a beginner I prefer the old hair system because there's a slider for everything and I don't need to do anything manually but if you are up to speed with geometry nodes you can do so much more with this new hand system it's crazy next let's look at the randomized length mode this is also pretty straightforward you set a Min and a Max and then the hair length will vary randomly between them there's also the hair thickness node which replicates this menu from the overall hair system you don't actually see any field when you open this node so I would suggest you go into geometry notes Tab and plug the two human feel into the group input and then you can change the overall thickness of the air from the modifiers tab itself inside the geometry node setup you will again see a float curve node which has three points in it each point determines the thickness of either the top the bottom or the middle of a hair strand we add a similar menu in the old air system but it only has the tip and the root as option then there's the resample modifier that you can use to set up a global value for the number of points on each hair curve overriding the initial value that is set up and adding the hair you can also simply assign a material to the hair system here this is also the delete hair node that just helps remove a portion of the hair that you've already added this can be used in situations where you added way more hair than you intended to and then don't want to use the subtract brush to remove the manually this comes really handy in that case there are other node systems in the sample file as well like the duplicator and offset node which kind of tries to replicate the children interpolation thing that was there in the overhead system it didn't really work so I couldn't use it for this video okay now that I've covered the basics let me get to an actual project and test it all out I'll be trying to replicate this giraffe image that I showed earlier I obviously model the giraffe or the hoodie or any of those animals that you saw in the beginning they were all from sketchfap so I'll link them in the description now I used all the options and tools and everything that I showed you in the first part of the video to get this new air system working on the giraffe so I think I better get to the pros and cons list right away okay let's start with the con when I was initially setting up the hair system I noticed the add brush was really lagging I was barely able to move my mouse and blender was really struggling to add even 10 strands of hair onto this giraffe head I figured out this was because the mesh was too dense so it decimated it a little bit and that really helped but it was still not perfect so I decimated the model a little more and this time it got really smooth now I have to admit I have a really outdated laptop with a GTX 1650 and 16 gigs of RAM and ryzen 5 4 600 Edge processor if you have a better computer you probably wouldn't have this issue but I'm sure there are a lot of users in this community that do have a weak PC and I didn't face this issue in the old hair system so I thought I'd mention it once this issue was resolved it was time to spread the hair around and I have to be honest I had a lot of fun doing really satisfying to paint the hair around I felt like a barber but in Reverse instead of cutting the hair I was adding it now this is a pro for sure the amount of control you have when you're manually adding each strand of hair is really liberating in the old hair system the hair particles just spread around everywhere and you had to use weight panes and what not to control where they went which is not always fun and I'm aware there was a similar option in the older system as well but this was way more fluid and intuitive so that's plus one for the new system next I tried combing the hair curves where I found another tiny little con which was when you're combing through the air curves there's a high chance you will push the hair into the mesh since there is no system to prevent that from happening right now it's there in the older system you can set a threshold value and the curves will never Collide into the mesh but there's nothing like that in this new system for now but as far as I know I think the team is already working on something to prevent that so it's not a big deal just reduce the radius of the brush and come a little carefully that's all but now comes the biggest Pro for the new hair system I think this is what will Define the future of this whole thing which is more and more brushes like the snakehold brush if you've ever used the snake oak brush for sculpting you know what it is capable of and now you have that in this new hair system it's really effective if you want to add some variation throughout the hairspray it's so effective that you're bound to overuse it it does so much with so little effort that you're bound to go crazy with it and I'm sure there are going to be a bunch of other new brushes in the future as well that will help customize the look even more so this is a huge proof of the new hash system now next on the list is the density brush and I think it'd be harsh of me to say that it's 100 a con because I can see a lot of instances where it will work better than the old particle based Tire system but let me explain one of the biggest issues I face while remaking these images was the number of hair was never enough I could always see the skin underneath the hair and at first you might think just increase the count on the add brush and go crazy with that and you'd be right but an even better method would be to use this new density brush which in its auto mode will fill up or empty the gaps between the already painted hair so you just need to put a count value here and then you can paint on wherever you need more or less density but my point is it wasn't this TVs in the overlay system all you had to do was activate the interpolated children hair particles and it would do the work for you automatically and then you could increase the number of children hair as much as you wanted in the new system though you have to do it manually which as I said is kind of tedious but on the other hand it gives you a lot more freedom as well you have full control over the density you can paint it on wherever you want it and remove it where you don't need it and this customizability would be tedious in the old hair system so it's not a con but not a pro either for my particular use case because I was looking for a quick result and didn't need a lot of customizability so the old head system was kind of better in doing this our last thing on the list which is unfortunately a problem before mentioning it though I'm not trying to on a new hair system by any means I'm fully aware that it's at a very nascent stage but it's already so functional and better in so many ways from the overlay system so I feel bad even listing these negative points but I hope that doesn't take anything away from the developers who've been working on it for a long time so just take this video as a case stud and nothing else that being said let me tell you the problem now if you open this data properties tab that looks like a bunch of air and you look underneath the surface section you'll see this hair system is attached to a UV map and while working Human animals other than the giraffe I got this invalid UE map error most of the times the issue as it turns out and as you might have already guessed is that this new system doesn't work if the model has overlapping UVS which was never a problem with the OLS system which is the only reason why this is the con it's not even a con it's just how it works so if you get this error this is how you kind of solve it you just go into the object data properties of the surface you're spreading the hair on go into the UV map section click on the little plus icon and make a new UV map tab into edit mode press U select smart UV project and increase the island margin by one unit now that should solve the problem for most people but if it doesn't you're just gonna have to manually find overlapping Islands then separate them in the UV editing tab once you're done with that just go back to the hair Tab and paste the name of the new UV map and that should fix it and again this isn't really a problem with the tool it's just how it works and in its defense I was using some really weird third-party models which had really weird topology and UVS some partial to blame errors are but now at this stage I was almost done with the grooming process for the giraffe just an additional tip for beginners who are trying to make something like this don't be lazy while you're making these air systems add as many layers as you can to sell the detail like for this giraffe alone I had four Hair Systems one for the overall body one for the horns one for the ear and the chin and then another one for the back the more layers you add the better the final result look at the sample file itself there's so many layers in it I can say it with certainty that's the reason why the whole character looks so damn good so do that for your projects as well and with that let me show you how the final thing turned out here they are in my opinion I think they look almost identical the old hair system version actually looks kind of cartoony to be honest like it looks more like a stuffed toy and the left one looks a bit more realistic so in summary the newest system shows a lot of promise I think the OLS system is really easy to pick up it's great for beginners but this new system will be way more powerful once the community starts making their own modifiers and the developers add a few more brushes in the future updates not only that this new system feels faster and more intuitive than the old system so I can't wait to see how it grows over the next couple of years before ending the video just a final point I did try replicating other animals as well but for some reason it just didn't work out it was not just the UV Island issue there were a bunch of other problems as well the topology the overall construction of the third party meshes that I was using and I just couldn't figure out a solution for them but I thought I'd mention them because it didn't happen with the old air system so yeah that's it that's it for this video thanks for watching I'll see you guys soon bye

Channel: stache

Views: 37,108

Keywords: blender hair, blender hair tutorial, blender hair 3.3, blender hair geometry nodes, blender hair tool, blender hair simulation, hair particles, hair particles blender 3.3, blender 3.3 lts, blender 3.3, blenders, blender 3d, blender hair beginner tutorial, new blender hair system tutorial, how to make hair in blender, hair tutorial blender, new hair tutorial blender 3.3, geometry nodes, animal fur in blender, animal hair in blender, how to make fur in blender, blender 3d hair

Id: esytiS4JV5I

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 19 2022