Blender 3.5 New Hair Tools and Assets (A Beginner's Guide)

so an amazing new set of hair grooming tools and assets just got dropped in the newly released blender 3.5 and in this video I'll try and guide you through this new system to get a somewhat similar result to what you see right here on your screen so without further Ado let's get going [Music] which can be done in three different ways believe it or not the quickest way to add fur now is to just go to the add menu and then under the curves panel you'll find a new Option called fur you click on it and blender will automatically add a quick fur system for you if you go to the modifiers panel you'll see a bunch of geometry nodes linked to this new file system we'll cover them all in a little more detail as the video progresses but for now let me briefly just cover what each of them can do the first node allows you to control the overall thickness of the hair the second node allows you to control the overall amount or density of the air the third node allows you to add a noise texture of the whole air system and the fourth node allows you to add noise to each and every hair strand instead this new system is great for adding quick fur like maybe on a fuzzy carpet or a fuzzy sweater now do note this new hair system is entirely based on the UV map of the object you are applying the hair onto you change the UV projection you change the whole hair system so keep that in mind okay so the next way you can add this new hair system into your scene is kind of weird so if you go to the asset browser in blender 3.5 you will obviously see this newly added hair grooming elements in the asset Library there are six different categories here but we are currently just interested in the generation tab here you will see a node asset card generate hair curves which is exactly what we want so we drag it on to our object and once we do we'll instantly see some hackers now in the modifiers panel you'll again see a bunch of Sliders attached to this newly added node setup mainly the hair length which obviously controls the length of the hair hair material that assigns a material to the hair control points that controls how many subdivisions each hair strand gets and then obviously a density slider to control the amount of hair and what's weird about this method is when you go to the rendered mode you'll see that there are no app articles actually added to the scene this node just adds a bunch of hair curves and no actual geometry around these hair curves so the right way to do it would be to First add an empty hair curve to the object and then add this generate hair curve node to this empty hair object instead and only then we'll see some geometry around these curves now to any geometry node beginner out there just like myself you're probably thinking that this generate hair curves node is kind of stupid I mean why would someone want to just generate a curve and not the hair right from the beginning well it is kind of stupid for us we're not experienced with geometry notes and just want a quick and easy hair system but someone who is familiar with geometry notes might want to do a lot more with these generated curves spread something else on these curves rather than just hair so if you are acquainted with geometry nodes keep this node in mind now going back as you can see we have added this geometry around the curves now but they don't look like hair particles they look like cylinders which is definitely not what we want so to give it that shape of a hair strand we go back to the hair elements in the asset browser go into the right category and drag this set hair curve profile onto the curves to finally give it that pointed hair look now at this point you might have noticed that this generate hair curves node has a lot more useful sliders than the initial quick fur method that I showed you a moment ago like hair length and hair material so if you don't mind I'd like to go back to that quick fur demo file and show you how you can at least add these two things the material is pretty easy you just select the hair curves and assign a new material to it the hair length on the other hand requires another one of these assets if you go to the deformation category you'll find a trim hair curves note that you can drag and drop onto the hair particles and now with this lens Factor slider you can control the hair length and while you're in here let me also tell you about this random offset slider increasing this value here will increase the overall Randomness in the hair length of your whole system a very important slider in my opinion if you want to break the uniformity of your whole houses obviously it is very important in what order you place all these Geo nodes as well if you place the trim hair not before the noise the noise is added after the lengthening of the hair and if you add it after the noise the lengthening happens over the noisy head which I think is pretty understandable now at this point both of these methods are practically identical in the second method is you add the hair curves noise node and the frizz hair curves node you're literally generating the same thing on both ends the only big difference is the first method is using this interpolate hair curve node to generate density and here in the second method the generate Hacker's node is generating the density they both aren't obviously the same thing they both do different things and we'll go deeper into the interpolate hair curves node in just a minute but for now let me just finish up talking about these first two methods as I said before both these methods are great for adding a quick first system onto something like a carpet or a sweater for you don't really care where the hair goes meaning the hair is just spread evenly throughout the mesh but that's not entirely true you can control where the hair goes in both these methods as well as you'll see both the interpolate hair node and the generate hair node have this density mask feels which can basically refer to a Vertex group associated with the weight paint map so you can just paint a weight map onto your object remember the name of the vertex group then come back to the interpolate hair curve node and click on this tiny little icon beside the density mask field and then just type or paste the name of your weight map and you're done you cannot control whether a particle grows as well there's also this mask texture field right below the density mask field here which weirdly also does the exact same thing just instead of painting a weight map you paint a texture map instead and it literally does the same thing I could not find a difference between them at first I thought the weight map actually allows us to have three weight colors which is right for high density and blue for zero density and green for somewhere in between but the texture mask can do that as well black is zero hair while is 100 hair and gray is somewhere in between so I couldn't find a difference between them so if anybody's smarter than me is watching I would love to hear your insights on this but for now I would like to move on to the final and my favorite way of adding and grooming hair and blender right now which is to the scalp mode all you gotta do here is add an empty hair curve onto your object and then directly go into the sculpt mode and just choose the add hair brush and go crazy with it obviously the hair will be too long when you first add it so just go into this curve shape drop down and set a reasonable hair length here and while you're at it also set this control points field is six or eight or something low like that and now you can actually go crazy with it obviously adding one hair at a time isn't going to be efficient at all so we set this count feel to something like 20 and now we're actually good to go and yeah you have the add brush to add hair and the subtract brush to subtract hair and then the comb brush to calm or groom the hair now something that can happen quite a lot when grooming the hair is you might push the hair way too deep into the mesh which is not ideal at all so what I would suggest is turn on this little thing in the top right corner when you're in sculpt mode this will help you fix this hair clipping issue now except these three brushes I've only found myself using the grow or Shrink brush extensively which is as you can see is really useful to add some length variation in your hair system but that's it all you got to do now is sit down and patiently paint the hair onto your subject but if you've ever used any kind of hair system before you know that we can't just crank this count field up and just paint as many hair particles as we want because this can put a lot of load on your computer so what we instead do is just place a few guiding hair particles onto the subject and then drag and drop this interpolate hair particle note from the asset browser and what this node will do is automatically add instance hair particles in between around these pattern guiding High particles and now you can crank the density up in this node rather than increasing the count in the add brush which is always way more efficient I didn't use this note for the grooming in this project though because my computer was taking the load pretty well and not using the interpolated hair curve node actually gives you a lot more control on the hair particles you can comb them and groom them however you want so I opted out of it but it is an important note so make use of it depending on your particular use case there's also the duplicate hair curve note right beside the interpolate hackers node which also does something very similar what it does is it adds a ring of hair particles around the main parent hair particles rather than in between and around them this is also a great way to quickly increase the density of your hair spread and is apparently more efficient than the interpolate hair curves node so I ended up using this node instead for my project now as I said all that's left to do is just slowly and carefully add and groom the hair to your liking in the sculpt mode try and get as close as possible to your expectations right here in the sculpt mode because if you do these geometry node assets are just going to enhance them from here on out let's talk about the two node assets that you're definitely gonna end up using which are the hair noise curve node and the frizz hair curve node as the name suggests the noise node adds a noise texture onto your whole hair system and there are a lot of feel available here in the modifier panels for you to play around with but the distance field and the scale field are going to be the only ones you'll find yourself fidgeting around with the most in most cases same goes with the frizz hair curve node which can help you add some noise to the individual hair strands instead of the whole hair system I think the word frizz perfectly explains it and in that note as well the distance field is all you're gonna care about and I hope you understand that I can sit here and explain each and every field to you here on this video but then this video will be 50 minutes long and boring as hell and I think the best way to actually learn something is to just get in there and get your hands dirty so I definitely suggest you go and do that at some point well I'll try and cover on the important stuff here in this video if you don't mind that being said I think I've covered almost all of the most important node Assets in here in the asset browser this obviously other really cool nodes here and as well like the roll hair curves node and in the guides category the braid Clump and curl hair nodes which I think have really self-explanatory names if you ask me but I cannot fit them all into this one relatively short video I can't over value with this much information in just one video so again what I would suggest is you either play around with them yourself or alternatively just download the sample file the blender team made available on the blender 3.5 release page this is a gold mine of information and it has four different kinds of hairstyles here for you to study and learn from I wouldn't have been able to make this video if not for this source file so seriously check it out because you've got all the information you need about the curly hair notes and the braid hair node or the roll hair node right here in the source file along with a lot more but I guess that's it all I did for the hair grooming in this particular project was add and groom hair in the sculpt mode then add some length variation using the trim hair node and some procedural noise using the noise and frizz nodes and that's it for shading the hair you'd think I did something cool and crazy to get this nice salt and pepper look on the beard but I didn't do anything really while I was exploring through those Source lines I found this hair material node applied on almost all of these ladies and since this Shader already had a pretty decent setup I just copied it and apply it to my own project if you look setup the blender team have very graciously set up both an EV compatible hair Shader and a Cycles comparable hair Shader and it has a lot of things going on in it but primarily they've added a procedural noise texture system out of the hair system that is allowing us to add two different hair color variations and along with that some really handy options like darkened root and random color and noise scale which are also pretty fun to play around with but do know that even with all these tools at your disposal it is still your responsibility to make the hair system look good don't just add one layer of hair particles and call it a day add multiple layers with varying length and thickness and colors and noise to really sell the realism of the hair now some final points before we end this video first always apply the scale of the object you can apply the air system onto second enable the Symmetry option on the top right corner when sculpting or grooming the hair so you don't have to do the same thing twice this obviously can make the groom look a little too uniform but then it's your responsibility to add some variations using some straggler hair particles like I have here near the beer region to break off the Symmetry a little bit by the way you should also enable the Symmetry option while you're painting the weight map if it comes to that in your project another great tip is if your hair groom is just not looking right for some reason there's a very high chance that you've set the width of the hair to something uncanny you set it to something too big and the hair starts looking like Roots rather than hair and if you set it to something too low it just looks floofy like a cotton ball so pay real close attention to this radius feel in the haircut profile node because it can make or break your hair growth also I did all the grooming in this project using the third method which was utilizing the sculpt mode as I showed before but note that this all can easily be replicated in the first two methods I initially showed as well there instead of painting the hair you'll have to paint a weight map or Texture map to control where the hair goes and that's it finally as I said before this video is just a brief introduction to what the new blender 3.5 hair tools are capable of the real strength of this new system comes from geometry nodes in case you didn't already know every one of these node assets can be transferred to the geometry nodes editor by just clicking on this tiny arrow and then selecting move to nodes and here in the geometry nodes editor the world is your oyster you can literally do any and if you're well versed with geometry notes I am not so I'll just cleverly slip past it but in case you were interested in what they can do again the source file is available on the blender 3.5 release page is a gold mine full of interesting use cases and information so go check them out and I think one question that is bound to pop up in your head when you're hearing all this information is is this new system better than the old particle based hair system in any way and to answer your question If you're looking for hair simulation the old particle based hair system should still be your Preferred Choice this new system doesn't yet support has simulation but from what I've heard in red on Blended developer forums I think simulations aren't that far away either for everything else other than simulations I think at this point I can confidently say that this new system is the way to go the primary reason for that being there is gonna be a time where the community starts developing hair assets themselves based off this new system and I Envision time when you'll just be able to drag and drop different hairstyles onto your characters like maybe anime hair or NPR hair in just a few clicks of a button which would have never been possible in the old particle-based high system I mean you could do it but it would have never been this intuitive so get on with this new system as quickly as you can because it seems like the blender team is very focused on making this a replacement for the old particle-based hair system eventually so if you don't want to be left behind this would be the perfect time to get into it but I guess that's it this video let me know your thoughts on this new hair system correct me if in case I said something wrong because that can happen too I'll hopefully catch you guys in the next video so bye foreign

Channel: stache

Views: 26,146

Keywords: blender 3.5, blender new hair, new hair blender, new hair tutorial blender, blender 3.5 features, blender 3.5 release, new hair grooming blender 3.5, hair blender 3.5, blender 3.5 hair, fur blender 3.5, fur tutorial blender 3.5, hair assets blender 3.5, hair asset browser blender, blender 3.5 hair particles, 3.5 blender, geometry nodes hair, hair geometry nodes, blender hair in geometry nodes, beginner hair tutorial blender, how to make hair in blender, blenders, 3d hair

Id: i5EanKOhb9c

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023