Blender Hair Card Tutorial

[Music] hello hello good afternoon everybody and welcome to my neat little show here as you can tell we're just having a nice chill time relaxing in front of the computer so uh what i'm going to do today is a tutorial on uh hair other side hair it's something that's really kind of bothered me um as i've gone on i've tried probably every way i think there is to to do hair in blender um and it's it's it's kind of a frustrating path so i'm going to show you today how to do hair cards which are probably the easiest to put into games um and uh probably the lowest budget as well i don't know about that actually it depends if you're doing stylized hair you can always sculpt out the hair there are a lot of ways to do hair but this is a good way to try and do realistic hair on a budget um so the example i have there um i just kind of whipped up in a couple minutes just to show as uh something that we can we can go off of just to give you an idea of how it's gonna look look but yeah let's get started let's let's do this let's have some fun doing some hair so we're going to start out in blender and we're going to use two programs for this one is blender totally free of course and two is materialized materialize is totally free there are a lot of different ways to do textures on hair sometimes i'll use materialize sometimes i'll use photoshop for that step it really depends on what your preference is for this one i'm going to use materialize because not everybody has access to photoshop and yeah that's it's kind of expensive so um i'm gonna use materialize and i'll show you how to do it from there so uh what we're gonna do is we're gonna start off with a new file here in blender uh we are just going to press the one key to get ourselves centered it looks like my stream deck is telling me i'm using blender and i'll probably use a lot of the hot keys there uh yeah all right okay so we're going to delete that default cube and we're going to set up a couple of things here the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to change our render mode from ev to cycles all right and you can do whatever you want i generally do gpu because my gpu is faster at rendering actually that's not exactly true but it is better with path tracing so um yes i'll do that all right then under here while we're in the render tab um we're going to bump the renders up to whatever you you want to do for yourself for me my uh my gpu can handle quite a bit so i'm going to do 500 for this and we're going to do a couple of different things here de noising i'm going to just do optics for that and viewport automatic i'm going to go to optics um we're also going to go down to let's see where is it film film um and we're going to change we're going to change something over here something that's behind me so i'm going to move myself down for just a little bit we are going to click this little button right here that says transparent and that is going to give us a transparent background rather than a real background okay so now i'm coming back boop now that we've got that we're going to set up our camera the camera itself the camera we are going to just click this little arrow here and we are going to go 90 on the top one on x 0 on y and 0 on z or zed and that is going to make it face forward we're also going to set the x value to zero so that it's in the very center and we're not really going to worry about y or z yet we're not going to do that until we have actual hair set up so that we can we can take a look at it all right and while we're in the viewport here uh we're just going to pull our little light that we're given over to about where our camera is maybe a little higher doesn't really matter um and then we're going to go down to the light tab and we're going to set this to 1.5 and we are going to change it to sun and we'll we'll worry about our beam where it's going later but it's going to be somewhere in that direction all right so now we can actually start building stuff we're going to start out with mesh and we are going to add a plane just a silly plane right there in the middle of the uh of the map there map it's not going to be a map in the middle of the viewport all right so having done that we are going to go down to our particle tab on the plane and we're going to add a new particle system and we are going to click this little guy over here that says hair all right and actually we're going to click on the camera again and we are going to go down to our camera options and instead of perspective we're going to say orthographic and i did lie you're going to want to go to your output properties tab up here and let's do it at 2k so 2048 and so that will change our render dimensions to a perfect square and a 2k texture so that is good we'll pop into camera view here and we'll change where our camera is relative to the hair that we've created we're going to go g and z and we're just kind of going to center that and we're not going to zoom in quite yet just because we want to mess around with it and the hair is going to change lengths and it's going to be crazy so we'll wait to really line up the shot until after what we will do is we'll take the beam of light here from our sun and we'll put it right there okay so you see if we go into rendered mode it is um pretty pretty hair like i i'm i'm a fan of it i'm here for it okay and we're gonna do that and just see if we can't get it there we go okay so as we do this um we're going to go we're actually going to first select our plane again we're going to go back into our particle system and we're going to adjust some things around so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to take down the number of hairs uh maybe to 500 to start with and i am going to up the segments pretty much as high as they can go so 50. um another thing i'm going to do is i'm going to go down to hair shape and i'm going to change the root d diameter or the diameter root to maybe like half make it a little bit more believable i'm also going to click on the advanced settings there and i am going to that's what that's going to do is that's going to expose the physics so we have the physics tab here and in brownian i am just going to add a little brownie just a little brownie and what that's going to do is that's going to take the hair and kind of shoot it off in different directions like that so i'm just going to sit over here now because it's uh a lot of that stuff we're going to be doing is over here so i'm going to change that that's fine so now we have some pretty interesting looking hair it's not great it's not bad it's just kind of it's interesting all right so we've done that let's go down to render and i'm going to do path beast line and i'm going to just up the steps as far as i can go is 9 and there's another place to do steps i can't remember right now that's fine okey-doke ah it's not in physics is it no it's not okay that's fine all righty so we've got the hair shape we've got all that now we're going to do children so this is going to basically give children check of children this is basically going to add other hairs interpolated around the hairs that are already presents right now there are 500 hairs present the more children you give to each hair the less random the hair will look so largely we want to stay away from high numbers probably stick to around 10 and then if you want more go ahead and give it more actual hair see that's pretty thick so maybe i'll take it down to 250. and that's okay i'm i'm i'm more okay with that so with the interpolated children we're also going to give it a little bit of randomness um you can do parting clumping roughness let's do some kink and for the kink i usually like to do curl and you can see that gives it a bit of a wave there um let's see and what we're gonna do is we're going to give it a little bit more frequency frequency is goo i'm actually going to do this not rendering it each time viewport display okay so here's another thing um so and it's a step i totally missed but i was looking for it earlier if you go to viewport display and you increase the steps it's going to increase the the smoothness and i would just put everything to max if you can just because this is the only thing you're going to be rendering and you really want it to render well so we're going to do that okie doke okay so we're going to mess with this a little bit just on our own just to to give it something and we're going to give it a lot of wave we're going to give it a lot of wave but we're going to take the amplitude down which is going to make it look wavy but not crazy and we're going to change the shape and this is going to change where the kind of curl starts or is is the most prominent so right now you can see i am doing it right there so with curls usually as it goes toward the bottom the weight pulls it out more so you want to have the primary curl be at the root right here so we're going to do that and i'm going to up the frequency a little bit more just because i like it we're going to we're going to do curly curly curly hair um and yeah we're going to weight that a little bit more toward the edge and this is going to be stretched out a little bit so we're going to we're going to have fun all right and you can just really mess with things and i do want the hair to clump just a little bit give it some strand deviation that looks okay um okay so we're going to do that all right so once you have a hair sample that you feel pretty okay with um go ahead and go to your material that tab right there and you're going to add a new material and you don't even have to name it we're not going to save this we're not going to do anything you can pick a color for this material it will automatically apply it to the hair it should um and what would be a good hair color maybe we'll do like a really really red hair um possibly okeydoke that's that's pretty red hair but i kind of like it okay so as you can see [Music] um we've got a pretty good it's a little it's not thick quite thick enough for me um right now as is it's nice and thick here at the root and it looks good at the root um but i kind of want it to look better up there so what i'm going to do is because i want i want to keep the randomness i'm not going to add children to it i am going to go back to my hair tile and i am going to increase the number to 300 strands at the top um and that's going to keep that randomness that's gonna make it look more disheveled not less disheveled you can see that there are some strands that are coming off the edges there um i might even go up to 500 again i think my instinct might have been pretty good and since this is the only thing that i'm rendering right now i'm not going to worry about the budget i'm just going to go crazy with it i still like that there's a little bit of transparency right here but that's that's probably good for our purposes um okay so we're gonna do that we like that that's good um for the camera now we are going to adjust it to try and match it up to see what the best shot is i'm going to go back to this mode because rendering out every everyone is just going to waste our time and as you can see we've got a little bit going off frame that's why we wait until we uh we're close enough to the end of making our hair card go like that and then i am just going to move the camera up because it's okay to cut off the root the root is going to go into the head um the tips we don't we don't really want that cut off so now we can take a quick sneaky peek at our rendered look and see how it goes i think that's pretty good i would at this point tweak a couple of things yeah it looks like poop in that mode so i'm not going to do that i am going to change the roughness i'm going to make it a little less rough and i am going to add some metallic to it because hair is a little metallic i don't know what to tell you make it look like a l'oreal commercial and everything's fine all right maybe a little bit more metallic yes i like that okay so now we can see that there's some good variation here that light is providing us with that good variation and i like it a lot you want to be careful you don't want the light to get too extreme because materialize will not thank you for it but for what we've got here i think it's okay yeah roughness don't want to take it down anymore you can play with it see how it is i don't think we should go down any more than that okay so that's that's a solid that's a solid design there um yeah all right so now you can kind of see where we've gone with this i can actually change this camera okay that's good and we want to take up as much of the uh the frame as we can because it's really important to get that resolution out of there so that looks good i like that um let's go ahead and render this out real quick so i have a um you can't see it right now because i just don't have the window set up but what i'm doing is i've rendered out my hair and i'm going to save the render as a png file it's very very very important that you save as a png file and you want to have the settings be rgba the a is for alpha you want to have the alpha the transparency in the background inside the image so save it as rgba and make sure it's png okay all right so i'm saving it it looks good to me so we're going to go out of that and you are pretty much done with that that file so i'm going to start a new file what we're going to do is we are now going to go over to materialize materialize is a free program get it anywhere but it's it's very good so what we're going to do is we're going to go over to the diffuse map this little guy right here we're going to click on the little o and it's going to ask us what we want to open i am going to open the hair card that i just made we're going to select that and it's going to import it it's going to look god awful do not worry um then we're going to start by creating our height map and we're going to just adjust the levels until it feels good um and we're going to set it for details and we want to try and get as much out of it as we possibly can as many of those little black lines just make it apparent that this is hair and just feel free to mess with it take the contrast down i can't speak today so it doesn't look light and fluffy that's that's all we want so we just don't want it to look fluffy okay that's that's good enough all right um so we set that as the height map when we're happy with that and if you have a little bit of bleeding around the edges don't don't worry about it too much um this is all going to be outfit out so um a little bit of floof on the edges won't be a problem all right so from that we're going to create a normal map because we're not actually going to use the height map we're going to use the normal map you can use the height map if you want i i wouldn't um all right so we can mess around with this just until we we like likes what we sees and i'll probably make it and we're going to set that as the normal map that is beauteous okay and once we have that normal map we are going to show the full material and you can see it looks a little what's the word turdy a little turdy up there um the whole thing is going to look a little dirty um i i wouldn't i wouldn't worry too much all right but i do want that to look a little bit floofier so i'm going to clear that and i am going to clear that i'm going to start over on this guy because yeah i can see where it got a little bit that's why we don't want it to be poofy we want it to be extra sharp yeah it's better that's fine yeah i like that okay so that's going to be a little bit better and we'll do it again i'll create the normal map that looks pretty good so we'll set that as the normal map and if we show the full material yeah that looks more like hair it's a little it's a little intense actually let's create the normal map and let's take down the pre-contrast and let us take down the angular intensity it doesn't have to be crazy just has to be there set that as normal map and then we'll show the full thing that's pretty darn good yeah i'm not i'm not mad about that that looks great okay so after we do that what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that it is saving you don't have to do it as the same but i like to so i am going to save it as a png and i'm going to press this little s button in the corner here by the normal map and we're going to name it with the same naming convention just so we don't get confused normal and we'll do that okay now that we have that all saved we're going to go back to our blender file and for this project i'm just going to import a little head mannequin i have it's not really just something i whipped up like in my spare time it took me like two seconds all right so there's our head mannequin we've got that it's geometry is terrible don't look into it that much but anyway you'll probably have something better when you when you do your stuff i'll leave it there okay so ours is floating up above that's fine uh what we're going to do is we are going to um add a what are we going to add we're going to add we're going to go to curves we're going to add a bezier bezier i don't know how to say it um curve for one and what we're going to do to this curve is we are going to make it make sure that it's stretching out this way you can see that it stretches out with a weird little little curve there what we'll do is we will go into edit mode and we're just going to drag out this on the y-axis just a little bit just to give it that little feeling of a loop and um we're going to render this in real time just so you get a feeling of what it would look like in like a game engine okay so we're going to open this little curves tab it says object data properties i i don't think that's a great name for the curves tab but i guess not all of them are curves uh and we're going to change the resolution to i'm going to do it two no three four i'll do four yeah so i'm going to do four here because this is going to be the number of polygons across that our hair will end up being and so i want to do each section as four polygons across and so you can see immediately our resolution changes on our curve and it goes one two three four that's four lines um that's what we'll we'll say is good all right we'll go back into object mode and we are going to um actually add another curve and that is going to be a path this time and for those of you who have tried the um the method of of doing paths that are basically a beveled to a circle um this is going to be very familiar to you this is almost an identical workflow in fact i think it is an identical workflow except we're not going to be using uh beveled circles what we're going to do is um just use paths that become cards basically so this is very much the same i am going to take this down to four yeah i take it down to four i want it to be as low poly as possible so uh now this resolution going this way has been taken down so you're going to have a pretty low poly kind of hair do and what i'm going to do with this is i'm also while i'm in this this curves tab here it's not the curves tab but i'm going to call it the curves tab darn it um i'm going to go to bevel object bezier curve i'm going to call it bezier because i'm not sure exactly what that what the correct one is but it's something right and so now if we go into op or edit mode we can kind of see what this will look like and you can see it's it's very um it's smooth shaded um but you can see the the places where it's flat uh where the geometry is is terminating and i think that's that's probably good enough for our hair um i promise you will like it once it's done maybe i don't know and as you're watching this be sure to ask me any questions in the comment section that you'd like feel free to link to your own projects if you want i love seeing other people's work that's what keeps us inspired so what i'm going to do is i'm going to in object mode i'm going to take this whole path and i am going to center it on the x-axis so i'm going to take it to zero then i'm going to apply a modifier and that modifier is going to be the mirror modifier and we're going to have it on the x-axis so that when i go into edit mode and i'm actually going to go into edit mode on my deck here my stream deck so that i have all my stuff and we select all of these points and we pull it out you can see that it is this symmetrical so with that in mind um we are just going to scale the whole thing down just a little bit because it's a little large right now and then we are actually going to do our points and scale them down and this is done with alt s so you're actually scaling the size of each vertex uh all right and then we're gonna line it up one thing that's useful for lining this up i think is um actually doing uh face snapping so if you grab this guy with g it will snap to the surface of the skull which i think is pretty cool and i wouldn't recommend clipping at this point but if you'd like you can clip it so that it becomes one i actually don't know if that it does it at all yeah it does okay see so it can become one one thing um and we can snap that to the skull it sounds so violent snap it to the skull all right and um i would recommend for this uh turning on the proportional editing and to connected only so that you can drag around these points and it will largely drag around the other points with it so that it stays nice and smooth but what i'm going to do is i'm going to go like this just so we have a nice little part here and yes i am staying in clipping just because it doesn't really matter right now and we can just drag around our points to kind of form the hair i'm going to turn proportional editing on for this boop and if something doesn't seem quite right um what you can do is you can do control t and that's uh that's for like twist that's the way i think of it ctrl t and that will actually twist each each vertex so you can actually make it curly you can do a lot of stuff with it but that's for more stylized and correcting stuff right now we're just kind of placing everything and that i'm going to just put down like i want to keep that i'm going to turn off this just pull that right there okay so now we've got four better or worse i say that a lot i apologize guys um for better or worse we have hair who'da thunk all right and now what we're going to do is we are actually going to add a texture for this and for this we are going to say hair and what we're going to do is we are going to open up our shader editor we're going to start adding our hair that we made before so we'll go to texture image texture drag the color to the base color and we are going to open up our diffuse texture or whatever you'd like to call it base color texture basically the hair that we rendered dot png and we're going to take the alpha and we are going to drag it down to the alpha area and there is going to be something that you'll need to do here and that is add first and input you're going to go to input and you are going to go to if i can remember where it is [Music] a texture coordinate you're going to get a texture coordinate and then you'll go to vector and mapping and you're going to take the vector from mapping you're going to go right into the vector for hair card diffuse then you're going to take the uv coordinate off of texture coordinate and you're going to plug it right in to vector and that is done and i did do that if you get that joke leave a comment in the comments all right disney fans can you tell i'm a disney fan can you tell can you tell that i'm a disney fan that wasn't creepy all right uh okay so that's that's just to kind of set up how we're gonna do our coordinates here so we are rendering an eevee right now and ev has a special thing that it needs um when it has something that is an alpha it needs a special alpha to be applied to the blend mode on the the material itself so i alpha hashed for hair and that should be good let's take a look at it in rendered mode that's an atrocity um so yeah so that is one of the unfortunate side effects is that this will come out sideways when we're coming straight out of the gate not to worry that's why we have the mapping here so what we can do is we can just kind of play with i don't even know if that does anything i don't think that does do anything with some of the coordinates and it is going to change let's actually see texture if this changes anything in 3d space better oh my god okay so location's fine um let's see my goodness so yeah you're gonna have to play around with this a little bit because it's kind of a pain that looks pretty good and it takes some tweaking to just kind of get it in the right place i'm gonna be honest with you it's not easy and what you want to try to do is you want to try to fit the edges of the hair within your plane so within your card so you want it to look wavy you don't want it to cut off like a sharp line you want it to have a little bit of edge to it okey doke okay so now that we have a kind of visual of what our hair is going to look like we can modify it a little bit more and you can see that it's at a point where we really like we want it to be thicker up here we want it to be thinner down there so that's good good start and now we have that we can just select that entire row and we can actually just duplicate it move it backward you can start to place more hair we can start to do it in layers um ooh girl get your hair did i'm never i'll never do that again i'm sorry um and yeah we can just kind of mess around with it and see what feels good but i recommend if you're doing a serious project i recommend very very strongly um do something that has a lot of layers lots of little hairs sticking out i'm this will definitely support that and certainly last but not least beyond just placement because you can do that that's totally up to your own artistic style um what you want to do is you want to add that normal map that you that you have so we'll finish up the material here and we'll do that actually by duplicating this texture we are going to import the normal that we made and why we duplicate the texture is because it will automatically route to the folder that you made for your textures so it's good to duplicate saves you some time we're going to change this normal map to non-color because it's it's data it's not color information and uh what are we going to do we are going to add a vector and normal map we're going to plug the color into color and the normal in to normal and that is going to be wrong you'll see right away and that's just because it's not vectored per correctly so we're going to take that vector that texture coordinate and we're going to plug it in there you go now we have some depth to our hair looks better looks passable and now we can mess around with the roughness and the metallic and all of that good junk and we can change it any way you like i don't exactly like the color i don't think that's okay and you can mess around with how it falls how it looks change all the stuff but that is essentially your hair card and you can make multiple hair cards you can do stuff that see i mean the sky is kind of the limit you can do little strands like tiny strands and then you can put those in as separate hair cards um i recommend doing lots of layers i saw the guy from horizon zero dawn the one who did eloy's hair i mean he does layers and layers of hair cards um kind of in a similar way that we're doing it here so i would recommend doing lots and lots of layers for realism but this is very economic to i noticed that we have our little guy there so i've got to change it perfect all right so once you have this styled and set up the way that you want it so right now it's it's just a path but in order to change it into something that's more economic we go over to object we can say convert to and we can convert that to a mesh and that will automatically apply your mirror modifier and it will turn this into polygons so this is no longer a line anymore but you can see it hasn't changed so uh if we look at this at edit mode you can see that this is actually very i could have done more on the back it could have stretched it out more this way that's very interesting that's good to know but you can see that this is now a more economic uh mesh and it's it's not bad right now it could probably be a little bit more optimized but it's only 480 triangles right now faces are 240. that's nothing so yeah you can optimize this even more you can mess with it it is probably my favorite way to do hair um so yeah that is how you do hair cards in blender totally for free um can be used in games uh can be made to look better than i did on this example with the correct amount of care and time so that'll do it for this example if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment um if you liked the video please leave a like and if you want more videos like this please subscribe to my channel i'll try to do some more stuff outside of zbrush or maya or anything else try to keep it i like to try to keep it to free software um like unreal um like blender i love blender blender has a special special place in my heart but i digress uh go ahead and subscribe if you want to see more videos like this and thanks for watching bye

Channel: Near Sight

Views: 7,993

Keywords: Blender, 3d modelling, hair cards, games, character design

Id: JXq3BH4uOU4

Length: 43min 7sec (2587 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021