Blender Tutorial - Hair With Curves

there are so many different ways to make hair in blender often one of them gets overlooked because of its simplicity I'm talking of course about using blender curves there have been a couple tutorials on the subject including a great one by CG cookie but I feel like there's a lot of overlooked flexibility when it comes to creating appealing hair in this video I want to talk about the basics of modeling and creating materials for hair from curves and I'm gonna focus on some options that can give some extra depth to your model and to your material I am going to assume that you have a basic understanding of blender I will talk about some of the shortcuts but I'm gonna assume that you're familiar with all the different modes especially as we get into material creation if you aren't very familiar with winter there are a lot of tutorials you can go find to get you up to speed so let's just jump into it okay so to get started here I'm going to give an overview of the core concepts of how I model hair to start we're going to need two objects I'm gonna add a curved path and a curve Bezier circle the path will serve as our hair strand while the Bezier circle will be extruded along the length as a bevel object if you go into the path settings for the hair strand under the geometry tab you can find a bevel object selector we can use that to select the bevel circle immediately you can see that it is extrude along the length of the hair strand we're gonna go into this fuzzy circle just to create a little bit of definition I'm gonna scale it and provide a little definition little geometry so we can see what's going on and I'll talk a little bit more about this later on in terms of what you can do and and what you can change here how to make this a little bit more interesting for now let's I get into the actually modeling the hair though so in addition to positioning the hair you can also have control over the width of the object and the tilt and these two controls give you most of the control that you're going to need to model the hair the width here is controlled with alt s and the tilt is controlled with control t another way to control the width of the hair is by using a taper object for the hair strand but I prefer doing it this way because it gives you a little bit more control so let's take a look at what this looks like practically I'm gonna go ahead and move our curve object to the first layer where I have a stand-in head placed and I'm gonna go ahead and you add a new curve a new path to start modeling the hair this is our hair strand so I'm just positioning it as our first hair curve okay so now I'm going to select our bevel object in the geometry tab and when I do so you can immediately see that it's way too large but that's easy enough just scale it down with all s and start positioning it with our with our two controls the tilt on the scale once I have something that I like I'm just gonna select the whole thing with L to select link geometry and duplicate it with shift D when you're doing this sometimes it can be helpful to remember the pivot point controls hitting period on your keyboard shifts the pivot point to be the 3d cursor which you can place anywhere with your left cursor now when I duplicate and rotate it'll rotate around the new pivot point that 3d cursor which can be easier to control don't forget to switch back to your selection pivot point however just by hitting the comma key I'm gonna go ahead and speed this bit up a little bit placing all the hair is just a combination of those of those techniques if I was gonna talk about design at all I would say to pay attention to the way that the curves lay on top of each other and instead of trying to create a flat hair curve all the way across I try to try to build the hair at layers up in a way that kind of feels natural okay so I I kind of like what I've got going on over the ear here so I'm just gonna duplicate it and mirror it across to the other side of the head we can do this by selecting both of those curves without choosing the mirror point with the 3d cursor changing the the pivot point now we're gonna duplicate those those curves and scale it on the negative x-axis note that sometimes when you do this blender has a problem interpreting the orientation of duplicate of mirrored curves and so often when you do this you need to adjust the tilt to keep it identical okay so nice I have the two sides there I'm gonna go ahead and smooth this up again as I fill in the rest of there if you're working on a hair project for the first time it can be super helpful to use reference so that you're working on something specific otherwise a lot of times you can be just like stranded and floating in the dark and not really sure where you should put a specific strand of hair or what not nice I kinda like what's going on so I'm going to go ahead and continue to the back of the head for the purposes of making this easier I'm going to duplicate one strand and separate it into a separate object and then use the mirror modifier to mirror to cross the face note that I'm going to have to adjust the position here to make sure that the mirror modifier is correct here I'm gonna go into hyperspeed as I continue finishing out the Resta hair on the back of the head the one thing you should note is that on the on the back of the head sometimes you need to use the tilt a little bit more often to make sure that it aligns with the scalp [Music] one thing I'd like to point out here though is when you're working with curves that are vertical blender doesn't know how to handle the orientation and that can be a problem when you're positioning because just positioning or when moving one vertex can rotate the entire curve like so the way you can get around this is just by creating kind of an l-shaped anchor up at the top of the curve and this kind of creates an orientation for the curve and blender will know how to interpret that so that when you move it around it doesn't rotate so rapidly modeling the longer hair is just the same as modeling anything else just paying attention to the layering of the curves and stuff like that here you can see me solving some of those things that are sticking out that I'm not liking so much all right that's pretty good for now so I'm gonna go ahead and start taking a look at the bevel curve and see what we can do to change the we'll just make this hair a little bit more interesting okay so the bevel curve is just a curve so you can change the position and orientation of any of these points to make it more interesting I'm gonna go ahead and so divide it and I'm gonna change these handles to get them a little bit sharper over in the tool panel here on the left you can see the the vector option for handles and you can see that this gives you control over the individual handles and I'm gonna go ahead and pull that those controls up to create creases in the curve I'm gonna go ahead and also do that with the the center there to create these three kind of sharp bits along the curve that you can see is is pulled along the length of the hair strand also remember that the the curve object doesn't have to be a single continuous object you can add floating strands on the outside that can give it a little bit more depth and a little bit more variation and maybe a little bit more interest you can see how this has added some floating strands just pushed along the edge the length of the hair cool let's take a look at how this looks in render nice we're off to a good start so that's an overview of the hair modeling let's jump right into materials okay so we're gonna go ahead and split the window and add a node editor again I'm gonna assume that you kind of know your way around the basics of the node editor but let's go ahead and add a principal shader make sure to add it to both my hair objects here a lot of the trigga this is in a single check box in the curve option settings under texture space you can find it check box called use UV for mapping and if you check that it allows you to project textures along the length of the curve and use that as the texture space we are gonna take advantage of that to add some shader goodness and take this hair to the next level okay so I'm gonna go ahead and start with the noise texture here I'm using the node Wrangler add-on which takes a lot of the guesswork out of options and stuff and also allows you to preview out textures in a nice way so when I look at this noise texture you can already see that it's being projected to along the hair so I'm gonna change some of these settings to make it a little bit more strand like you can see what it's doing there nice I like that so I'm gonna go ahead and add this into a bump node and put it in the principal trader when I do that you can you can immediately see what that's doing obviously just like a matter of taste how much you want that I'm gonna keep this drink around 0.5 or something I'm also gonna take this opportunity to change the roughness and make it a little bit more matte just so we can see the light a little bit nicer okay great now that we have that bump we can use that to control the color of the texture so I'm gonna create a color ramp whoops and I'm gonna go ahead and plug the noise into the back color ramp and the color ramp over to the principle trader okay and then just remembering that this noise texture is controlling both the bump and the color ramp I'm just gonna make a darker color for the for the lower colors and a lighter color for the highlights that's just gonna add a little bit of depth which is gonna be kind of nice the other thing that we can do here is add a gradient that can be projected along the length of the curve if I go ahead and plug in this UV to the gradient I can use this to mask out different sections of the of the length of the hair you can kind of see that it has a gradient along the length of the curve and I'm gonna go ahead and add a color grip to let us control that a little bit more specifically you can immediately see what's going on so I'm just gonna go ahead and add this and then mix this into the the hair color um here in here I'm controlling kind of the roots of her hair as it as it is close to the hair that is closer to her head I'm gonna make that a little bit darker and you can immediately see what's going on there cool okay so the next part of this is working with an anisotropic shader and I'm not entirely sure of the math behind the eat and a strawberry shader but from what I understand it just simulates the way light reacts to a very tightly crude surface often used with metals but we can use it to give us kind of a nice Sheen so we're just gonna plug in the buff node and I'm gonna plug into UV to the tangent and that just lets that just Maps the grooves of the ns type of shader along the length of the curve and you can play around with the settings of this node a little bit what I've found is that the Annis tropic rotation should be similar around 0.25 to be pulled for that that correct orientation of the grooves to be pulled along the length of the curve and you can see here how the shader has lined it's kind of the reflection is kind of lined up along that edge and it just gives a nice a nice a nice effect so let's play in the sky and turn the roughness up very nice so let's go ahead and mix this with a mixed shader nice it's already looking pretty sweet okay so the last piece of this puzzle is adding some strand separation in the tips of the hair to make it fade out a little bit nicely and I'm gonna do this by adding a transparent node and using a texture to control it and we can just simply by using the gradient and the noise that we created earlier so I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this color ramp to control the gradient we want we're using this to control where we want the separation to me we want to kind of at the end and now I'm gonna add in a math node so to multiply and I'm gonna multiply the noise texture into that gradient and you can see what happens it's just adding those strands along the length of the curve now if I create and yet another color ramp we can use this to control exactly where we want that separation to happen and this is going to be our our mask that we use for the transparency so I'm going to duplicate this mix node and add in a transparent shader and then plug this mask into that as the mix and you can see how it effects it let's go ahead and adjust this a little bit to make that living room yes there we go all right let's take a look all right so this already looks pretty awesome especially for the work that we've put into it you can see that the machine of the hair is really nice and the fall-off is is feels really natural there's one more thing that we could do to just bring it a little bit closer together so let's let's dive in just for another minute here we're gonna talk about adding some subsurface to the principal shader if I just if I just up this up just a little bit point one let's say and let's change the radius down just a little bit to something a little bit more reasonable you can see that kind of removes the separation and kind of makes it feel a little bit more cohesive I don't know if this is realistic but it makes it a little bit more a little bit warmer a little bit more appealing for the color I like to keep it close to the original color but a little bit warmer and a little bit more saturated I don't know if that's realistic I'll either but just aesthetically this this does add a whole bunch of render time though so I mean use at your own risk but but it really can't add something if you're going to give it the time here I've exaggerated the effects so you can kind of see how it can change your hair here I'll fade in the old one so you can see what the difference is and kind of compare and contrast and there you have it hopefully this gives you a starting place to start making your own hair in blender I'm gonna be posting a few hair and material setups that I made on Gumroad so if you're interested in pulling apart my files go ahead and follow the link in the description to check those out while making this video I realized that there's a whole bunch of stuff yet to explore in this area there's a bunch of experimentation that can happen with different combinations of strands and bevel control such as making curly hair or hair with different densities also with different material setups you can make hair that's mostly transparent like adding wispy hair as details additionally if you're working with blender 2.8 Development renderer Evi this method can work pretty well you might have to do some material tweaking but generally the concepts apply the same when it comes time for animation remember that curves can have soft body simulation applied to them which from my limited testing looks like it could be pretty effective but remember if worse comes to worse and nothing is working blender curves can be converted to a mesh with a click of a button so manual editing or animation of the geometry is always possible so thanks for watching this is my first tutorial and I have some ideas for a couple more if you liked it let me know if I like or a comment and if you have some ideas for improvement feel free to get in touch with me on my Instagram at pancake manicure where you can also keep up to date with what I'm doing thanks so much you

Channel: Pancake_Manicure

Views: 502,077

Keywords: blender, 3D, tutorial, hair, 3d design, character, character design, curves, blender curves, modeling, materials, cycles

Id: t2XjdzzWCqI

Length: 20min 40sec (1240 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DevinPatches]

Awesome! Great way to save resources and make something more easily customizable than using particles.