Blender 3D - EASY Character Hair for Beginners

what's up everybody i got a lot of questions regarding how i did the hair on my character here so i thought i would do a tutorial on that i see a lot of tutorials on how to use hair particles to kind of make these fuzzy balls or i've seen a lot on hair simulation but not many on how to make actual kind of character hair outside of a stylized form so let's take a look at how i use the particle system to make this now if you're interested in a deep dive into kind of all the hair particle systems i actually have another tutorial on that and this one we're going to be focusing specifically on how to make more of kind of a humanoid style hair for your character if you want to learn how i made this character i actually have a skillshare course on modeling this character and then a follow-up course on texturing this character but for now let's dive into how to make the hair so first of all one of the mistakes i see a lot of people making is applying hair to the wrong parts of the character or not giving their hair kind of shape underneath so let me explain what i mean so i'm going to switch here into solid view here and then i'm going to tab into edit mode and over here i'm going to use my hair material to select all these micro spheres here that i have to represent the shape of the character's hair so i'm going to go ahead and hide there and what i'll see a lot of people do is kind of select parts of their scalp here to apply hair to and that is one way you can do it especially if you're doing short hair what you can do is you can switch into face select mode you can grab some faces and apply that to a vertex group and apply your hair to that but what happens is in order to get that kind of volume of hair you end up having to render so many more hair particles that you end up slowing down your machine and for a lot of people that aren't using a render farm that's just not realistic so it actually helps to kind of add some volume to your hair with some models so that you don't have to use as much hair to cover it now if you're looking for realistic hair simulation this may not be the method for you you may want to actually comb that hair into shape but for most people they're looking just to kind of get a semi-realistic looking hair so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to unhide those icospheres and what i'm going to do now is i have all these icosphere selected so what you want to do is select whatever portion you want your hair to appear on and another tip here if you're not doing animation and if you're not doing like a 3d turnaround if you're just doing a photo only select what's visible so i can see here that these are really the only ones that are visible so what i'm going to do is go ahead and kind of deselect all of these vertices in the macro because i know that i'm not going to see those in my final render for now and what that's going to let me do is allow me to use less particles because even if you're on a high-end machine i'm on a decent machine here and i have an rtx card and even i kind of struggle to view some of this stuff in the viewport when it gets to the final render and it took me quite a long time to render as well so i'm only going to select the pieces here that are visible in the viewport if you want yours to be visible in animation of course you'll need to select everything so we're going to come to do is come down here to the object data properties go to the vertex group add a new vertex group we're going to call this hair and then we're going to assign that make sure your weight here says one if you tag over into weight paint mode you'll be able to see where it is and you can of course soften that selection if you want using the blur tools and things like that but let's hop over to the particle settings so i'm going to operate here from the front view here so i'm just going to go ahead and drag this window over here and then i'm going to add a particle system to our character so let's come down here to the particle tab we're going to click new particle and let's name this hair particle now there's two names here there's the name of the particle system slot on your character and then there's the name of the actual system so you can name both of these hair if you want to kind of keep that uniform and consistent so right now by default when you add a particle system it's emitter so the first thing we need to do is click hair and you'll see that it goes everywhere it gets kind of crazy nuts with the amount of hair you have there and also the length is crazy i don't know why but for some reason the hair length is set to four meters as your default length so let's first go down here and add this to our group so first up let's just isolate this to our vertex group so you'll see this little vertex group tab down here and we're going to twirl that down and we have density length clonk kink and all these other options now the ones you're most often going to use are density and length so length will make it you know kind of longer based on kind of the softness of your weight paint so that's one way you can use that or you can just use the combing we're going to use density for now we're going to select hair and you'll see that it's isolating that to kind of our hair selection but it is so long that it's a bit difficult to tell so we're also going to go ahead and tick on advanced here because that sometimes has some helpful options i really feel like this should be on by default first what we're going to do is adjust the hair length here so let's try something really small like .25 and we can see here we're getting a much more realistic amount of hair now you'll notice here that we have our particles set to a thousand and even at a thousand things are still looking pretty kind of barren so what we need to do is use children now what children will do are actually give us hair particles that will be based around these parent particles but they'll actually render quicker than if we just had a bajillion particles on there so that's what we're going to be using to add a lot more hair but let's look at some of these other options first so if you noticed in the final render i had some curly hair on the character and one thing that always kind of trips people up is that they'll set the segments up here so let's say we set our segments to something like six because we want curly hair and what these segments do is they divide each one of these hairs so that'll give us six segments that we can kind of spin around and make a curl but then when you go to apply your curl you'll notice that they won't look right in the viewport and a lot of times that's because if you come down here to the viewport display you'll see that the strand steps are limited now this is so that your viewport won't lag as much but when you're trying to get a visual on your curls or other kind of humanoid character it can be difficult to see what you're doing so let's go ahead we're going to go ahead and bump this up to six and we'll leave the amount to normal you can also turn that amount there to lower the amount of particles you see but for the sake of this tutorial invisibility i'm going to leave that up but you can use those if you're having kind of a laggy viewport so now we have the stands in our character here and we're ready to go ahead and apply some children particles to give us a lot more hair so you have simple and interpolated and they just kind of give you a few different options i tend to find simple to be a bit more simple and easy to use so we're going to go ahead and use that so here you'll see that we have the display amount which is 10 children particles for every one parent particle essentially giving us 10 000 particles or at least that's how it's supposed to work and if we go here we can do a hundred here and you can see that things start to get kind of crazy but it's looking a little bit more natural again this display amount is so that your viewport doesn't lag if you're on a lower end machine set those numbers to lower numbers so next what we're going to do is we're going to adjust the radius of our hair so right now our hair looks kind of thick if i switch in here to render mode we'll get a better view of just how thick that hair is and you can see that that's way thicker than hair normally is so what you can do is come down here to the hair shape and change that and you'll notice that the diameter root is set to one meter and the tip is set to zero meters i like to set this down to something like .25 usually and i tend to find that to be a lot more kind of realistic in terms of the look so i'm going to switch back to solid view here and let's start playing with the look of our hair which is why most people are here so first of all we have a couple options here that we can do to give ourselves a bit more so we have clumping and clumping would be that if i turn this up which for now i'm going to set this down to 10 so we get a bit easier or maybe something in between like 25 and you'll see how the hair start to clump around each of the parent particles so all the children kind of start to form these little kind of like pyramids around and then you can add some twist to that to further kind of make that look a bit more natural so if you're going for a character with kind of spiky hair this would be the route to go i'm going to go with something more of curved hair so i'm just going to go ahead and reset that back to zero but that's how you could kind of achieve that type of hair here we have clump noise so what you could do is add noise to that clump give it a bit more randomness make it look a bit more real here's the roughness which adjusts the roughness of the overall hair and what we can do is mess with all these shapes here we can mess with the end point the shape the random size usually i find that just the uniform and random are enough so if i add 0.25 kind of the uniform you see that small numbers go a long way it gets pretty crazy so i usually do pretty tiny numbers like .025 and that gives me a little bit of randomness and then same here 0.025 and that random and what that'll do is make that noise kind of random all over and i find just that tiny bit is usually enough of course if you're going for a character with you know kind of wild crazy hair you could you know add a lot more there so those are usually the settings i kind of play with there now when you're doing humanoid characters most of the stuff you're going to do is going to be right here and then after that you'll hop into comb mode which we'll do in a second lastly we have the kink type so right now you can see that we kind of have just kind of like fuzzy little hair poking all out but you know most people that have volume to their hair like this aren't going to be fuzzy you know like an animal they're going to have like kinks like curls radials waves braids and spiraling each one of these does what they say now personally i found that curl tends to be most useful more so than all these maybe wave um but i've found that curl tends to be the most useful for most types of hair that aren't straight when we turn that on you can see that we get kind of almost this grandma style haircut and we're going to start playing with these sidings so that we can get this looking a bit more natural now first of all i want to make this a bit easier to visualize so i'm going to turn down my display amount here to something like 10 maybe even less let's do five and that'll let us just kind of play with this in real time so we can see more so here's here are the settings we have here so clump will determine how much the clumping setting up here affects your curls flatness is the flatness of your hair and shape deals with kind of adjusting the offset from the beginning to the end but the ones you're going to use the most are the clumpness which usually you'll just leave to one maybe turn it down if the clump is ruining your look but the most you're going to focus on here are amplitude and frequency so amplitude basically determines kind of the amplitude of the offset and simpler terms it kind of makes it kind of like the size of the curls in relation to your hair and the frequency here would be how many curls you have so you can see here that if i bring this down you can see that the curls aren't quite so massive and then if i bring this frequency up you can see that we're getting more curls and already you can see we're getting something much more natural with our character so i'm gonna go ahead bump that frequency up to maybe something like five because i want him to have like really tight little curls and then what i'm going to do is leave this amplitude somewhere around here maybe point zero five and you'll see that those are actually pretty small so let's see what happens when we turn our display mount back up and this part of the process is just kind of playing with the settings since it gets something you like so i know that i don't want too many children particles because it's kind of creating too much hair and not looking over early natural so what we can do is maybe play with the amplitude here again let's go ahead and try point one giving us a bit bigger curls and i'm going to turn down the frequency to something like three and that's looking a lot more natural a bit about our sponsor are you looking to level up your 3d skills then a great place to look is skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of incredible classes for creators explore new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity they have classes on blender character design productivity cinematography illustration business and more i'm a top teacher on the platform and i host several blender courses focused on characters and blender it's a great place to start learning blender as i really focus on kind of the basics in these courses and trying to help level up in my your first 3d animation class i'll walk you through the process of animating your first 3d character we'll cover the dope sheet graph editor and include free character rigs this class focuses on the basics and it's made for beginners to blender it's curated specifically for learning and there are no ads they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you the first 1000 people to use this link will get a one month free trial of skillshare so next up what we're going to do is play with the comb also i want to point out that this is one hair particle system and you may notice that small parts like this get exposed we can fix that in the combing mode but you can also go ahead and add another particle system with really tiny short hairs and then blanket that across your entire model and that's something that some people do where they kind of put their big hair in like certain sections where it's most important and then they kind of put small hairs around other areas so that's another way to kind of get realistic hair but for the sake of this tutorial we're just going to move on so what we're going to do is grab our character here and then we're going to hold tab and then i'm going to move into particle edit mode you should also be able to access that up here and you'll notice here that it kind of reduces the hair particles so that we can kind of quickly comb these things so when i go back into object mode i know that i have way too much hair here kind of intercepting the ear which is going to be okay kind of from the front view and then i know that i have a little bit too much on the forehead so in particle edit mode we have a couple different options most notably we have the comb mode so if i grab this cone mode i can begin kind of combing hairs and if i hold that f key i can change the size of that brush there and can kind of comb some of these and maybe tame some of those hairs to match what i want more so i'm going to go ahead and pull these hairs off of the forehead here and what you can do is kind of just go around and drag these to kind of mess with now the other one you may want to use is they have a smooth option here and that kind of lets you just kind of smooth out some of the random hairs and then they have one for length so if you wanted more hair to kind of grow longer you'll see here that the hairs are growing longer if i want the hairs on top here to be even longer and then we have the puff mode so our hair is already sticking out every direction but let's say that down here they're kind of looking a little too flat you can kind of start to puff them back out but the ones i use the most are the comb one the add and the cut so what the cut does will allow us to remove particles so let's go ahead switch back to object mode here and i can see that i still kind of have like a lot of hair up here let's come down over to the hair particle settings here and go to mission and you'll see here that now that we have this edit it won't let us kind of change our settings so you kind of want to get all of your settings here before you go into your edit because once you start combing things you're kind of locking out your edit settings that you have there aside from things like hair dynamics so you can just disconnect that hair delete the edit or whatever and start over there so what i'm going to do here is go back into particle edit mode so with the cut tool what that does will actually kind of remove hair so if i feel like i have too much hair around here at the bottom of the ears i can cut those out with that cut tool and you'll see now there's not so much hair around that ear now let's look at the add tool so we did have kind of a bald spot here that seems to have been mostly fixed by just using combing so if i go back into particle edit mode here in comb i can actually kind of comb some things over to maybe cover that spot and you see that helped quite a bit but what we can also do is tab back into particle edit mode and we know it's right there so we can do is click add here and this will actually let you add some particles now be careful if you click and drag this you will add a lot of particles at once but if i hit back into object mode here we can see that that's covered up that bald spot so with that i kind of have a basic kind of particle edit here so a big part of the realism with hair is the actual hair shader which you can see here is not all that great so one thing i'm going to do is i feel like my hair is still a bit thick so i'm going to come down here to the hair shape there are a couple settings you can edit after that and this is one of them and i'm actually going to make this a little bit thinner do 0.15 and then because i made my hair thinner i should probably kind of maybe bump up the actual amount of hair so i'm going to come here to my children and i'm going to do 100 and that kind of gives me a bit more here to work with i'm going to set that on the render amount though so that i don't slow down my viewport i'm going to leave this at 50 so that it can kind of show you what i'm doing real time then what i'm going to do here is i have a hair here and that hair is for that volume that i introduced before but what i want to do is create an actual hair shader so i'm going to click new and i'm going to click new material then i'm going to call this hair particle then what we're going to do is go back here to our particle settings and under render here we have the option of choosing how to render and for the material right now you can see it's using the shirt material which is why it's got kind of such a dull boring color and what we're going to do is click that and find our hair particle and that switch it over to that kind of white particle system that we have we're going to come over here to our shader editor we're just going to go ahead and get rid of this default bsdf i'm going to hit search search for hair now there's a couple different ones and you want the principled hair bsdf that's the newest one kind of the best looking one and then here you can see that our hair is already looking a lot more realistic now i have the render amount turned down so you can see some of kind of the icospheres i have underneath there won't need to worry about that for now we can change the roughness of our hair here making a glossiness or not you can add a coat to it to kind of give it a gelled look play with the index of refraction most of these you're going to ignore you play with the roughness and the color there are different other options here if you want to do melatonin concentration i prefer use direct coloring so my character i gave them kind of like an orangish hair kind of just a little red head and that's how i achieved that kind of hair effect so i hope you found this tutorial helpful as i said these do take a long time to render so hopefully you're able to find some settings that work on your machine if you'd like to learn how i texture this character and model this character please check out my course and as usual i love seeing what you create so please tag me in your creations at southern shoddy on instagram

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 18,416

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, character, blender 2.8, blender 3d, blender hair tutorial beginner, beginner, blender character modeling tutorial, modeling hair in blender for beginners, blender beginner tutorial, blender tutorial beginner, modeling in blender for beginners, blender 2.9, blender hair, character modeling, blender hair tutorial, character design, blender 2.8 hair beginner, blender character, blender 3d character tutorial, blender character tutorial

Id: BdGQipa5C8U

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021