Blender Tutorial - How To Quickly Place and Layer Hair Cards

[Music] hi everyone this is a tutorial about placing hair cards using modifiers in blender i always struggle placing cards manually so i found a way to do it more possibly here you can see the final result in unreal engine for this tutorial i'm using the hair tool addon i will leave the link in the description even though i'm using this addon this tutorial is about placing the hair guards so i will assume you have some knowledge about the tool and i won't go deep on how to use it the first step is to sculpt the hair i do that to establish the volume shape and flow ideally you would have gathered some references and sculpted the hairstyle you needed once i'm happy with the scalp i split the hair into three parts i do that because each part has a different flow and it's easier for the hair cards to follow edges that flow in a similar way so as you can see we have a part for the left the right and the front her tool comes with some nice features like materials and you wins before starting create hair cards i like to set the uvs for each different haircut to do that we will create some hair cards to be able to have more options in the menu so i'm gonna click here on cures for from grid surface then as you can see we have some hair cards here we are not gonna do anything with that yet so i'm gonna go and click on uv editing so here as you can see um there is this image that that's provided from hair tool if you don't if you don't have it or you don't see it just click on the image here and look for the hair strip 3 dot png so here i'm going to establish the different hair cards for uh so the different hair strands for each different haircut so you you want to click here on hair uv so here you can see like the the the first hair card with id 0 is already set for this hair strand so i'm gonna just edit it a little bit to give more space on the roots and then i'm gonna do the same for the for the following i want like probably i'm gonna use like four or five layers so let's uh create another rectangle here so that's gonna be id one then this one doesn't have too much density probably i'm going to use it for a later layer or the the flyaways then for the next density um i'm going to use this one then this one and then i think finally i'm gonna do we can probably do this one and the last one so the last two are gonna be on like more on the surface so that's why you need you want less uh density of the texture usually they are going to be for the fly aways here so once we are happy with setting those uvs we press enter to assign them and we are ready then i'm gonna remove this layer of hair cards that we done one and as you can see when you create hair cards the hair tool changes the preview to wire so i'm going to turn it back but yeah it's that's going to happen every time so here i wanted to show you a couple of things uh you can see the the topology here it's very basic and you have to keep in mind a couple of things first of all uh you need to have quads so even if you do a very rough topology you want to keep everything nice on quads because otherwise the hair tool is not going to work the second thing you want to have it's these sharp edges here and this is telling the hair tool where the hair guards should start and where or how they they should flow following the the rest of the edges so once we have done that for all our um for the rest of the of the groups we can start creating the layering this technique requires a lot of preparation but once it's done the haircut placement will be very fast i create the layering because it's very important to avoid overlapping and add variety each layer will have different coverage and different uvs i like to rename each layer to be very clear as we progress because we will have lots of layers and can get messy really quick so the first layer has these modifiers has a subdivision modifier to make the shape smoother if i turn it off here you can see you we have these like very sharp edges here or very polygonal edges and we want to avoid that so i add some subdivision you can go and add more to make it even smoother that doesn't affect the quality of the hair that just affects the way the hair is placed then i have a shrink wrap modifier and this is to ensure that the roots are stuck on the scalp to do that if i click here i can show you on the i have created a vertex group for the roots that it's just this vertex here so when i'm on the modifier i'm telling the modifier just to affect this vertex group and then the last modifier i have is the smooth modifier this is very optional maybe you need it if you go with a very rough topology i usually have it because the smooth modifier helps to evenly distribute the topology so the the quads are a little bit nicer but as i said it's not required it's just optional so once i have the first layer we can start creating the next layers another thing i want to point it's as you can see here i tried to be very clear with the naming for the layers so we are in layer 0 for the front right and left and then these first layer are going to have the uv 0 so let's start with layer one so what i do i just duplicate shift d duplicate then i'm gonna rename that uv one [Music] and then we're gonna keep the same modifiers and add a new one another shrink wrap and this time we want to change the snap mode to surface above surface and then target it's not going to be the scalp the target is going to be our layer 0. so right now we don't see any difference but then we are going to add a separation here with the offset and as you can see already the layer one has this well it's offset from the layer zero maybe we don't want that much so we need to adjust that accordingly probably zero one because we want the layers to be very close but to not touch each other and then the other thing i want to be sure because let's see that again as you can see here our roots are getting separated from the scalp so that's why we created on layer 0 and because we duplicated layer 1 it's going to have the same vertex group what we want to do is go to the vertices group and do and inverse as you can see here i have i created two vertex group but since we are doing the inverse of the selection we don't need really this one and then that's layer one i'm gonna change the offset to zero and that's what we want then layer two same thing [Music] i rename the layer and then for our target we want uv1 so again i'm just checking that we are keeping some distance from the layers [Music] then duplicate again that's gonna be layer three change the target to layer two [Music] um duplicate again where for well you get you get idea so we end up having um we want to have five layers per group so as you can see as i was saying before if you don't get a little bit organized and you don't have a good reference for each layer it gets very very confusing once we have all the layers for all the groups we are ready to create the hair cards the idea is always to go from bigger and fewer hair cards for more coverage to smaller and more hair cards for less coverage this creates more variety complexity and depth making the hair look more natural so for layer 0 we are going to have the bigger hair cards with a more dense texture the idea is the first layer should cover all the scalp possible we have to play with the width and the quantity that will establish our starting point then go to your hair tool tap and we are going to create curves from the grid surface so here we want as i was saying we want to have bigger hair guards and less amount so what i'm gonna do it's uh here we are at zero zero eight width and we have six hair cards so i'm gonna try to reduce this number to see them better and see how we how how white is the hair cards and the haircuts look pretty um white here maybe we can go a little bit smaller that looks kind of okay and then we can add maybe five so we have five hair cards at 0 0 5 and then the points per strand that's the quality of the hair cards so more more points are going to end up being more polygons so you want to be careful with this i'm going to show you for example if i have very little with six points per strand you can see like the the the we are losing it's like so low quality that there is not enough geometry for the hair to follow properly our curves so you we want to play with this and i usually for the coverage probably i start yeah 20 another technique that you can use when you are done it's when you have all your hair cards it's if you have too much vertex or too much too many polygons you can always decimate the hair but that's more like in the optimizing part so okay let's go with this so 0.05 it's going to be our starting point and just to have just to keep that in mind and then we can always uh preview how is it looking as you can see there is no much coverage here but that's probably because uh by default the material is selecting random cards so we want to click here and then we want to set our region to zero and i like to do zero and that other zero that the only thing that the second number does it's uh it flips the the uvs so you get more variation which i think it's very nice okay so we have layer zero i'm gonna hide the mesh and then we can add our next layer so again here what i want to do is i want to reduce a little bit so maybe let's go for zero four so how we have uh narrower cards but then i want to add a little bit more i think that can work let's show the preview then again we are going to want to unclick here and then set to one [Music] and little by little we are getting more coverage let's do the same for level two i like to switch between this view and the textures to see what i'm doing and the overlapping if you see that you start to get a lot of overlapping like here we can play a little bit with the offset so we can do maybe let's do two so we get less overlapping i mean to have this overlapping here it's not that bad at the end of the day the hair natural hair gets like it overlaps as well but the issue with overlapping sometimes it's um it creates weird shades weird shadows and some weird stuff but unreal has a nice feature to to avoid those artifacts i'm gonna leave it at zero point zero three zero no zero point zero zero three okay so let's create the hair cards as you can see the there is less overlapping now that's because the hair cards don't follow strictly stick with the shape of the mesh so um i want to reduce that again maybe 0 3 then add a little bit more then you can always play with uh if you want to add more variety obviously you can play with the randomizing space the lens i mean there is plenty of settings that you can play with and make that even more uh natural looking here the same thing we are gonna do two and two so little by little you can see like it's looking it's covering more hair it's looking kind of very good let's do three um here i'm gonna offset that a little bit more let's do three again hair cards i'm gonna reduce that to zero two and maybe add more of them another thing that is very important that i forgot to mention is to click this align tile that what does it aligns the hair cards with your mesh you if you don't do that i'm going to show you then you see the hair cards kind of do what they want i mean they follow a different [Music] a different flop not a different flow but like they aren't aligned with the mesh and we want we want to to have the hair guards following the mesh here that's three so we have five layers i'm gonna add one more layer [Music] so let me add four to one more layer i'm gonna select the last layer shift d to duplicate change the name and then [Music] change the target to player four okay and i'm gonna use these ones to add more like variety [Music] so for four let's create the curves that's gonna be maybe i'm gonna do zero well i'm gonna yeah we can because i'm gonna i'm gonna leave it uh i'm gonna leave the same and i'm gonna show instead of having [Music] many to cover here we're going to start to create more variation the surface of the hair to make it look more natural so i'm gonna add less maybe instead of zero zeros to two sorry i'm gonna do i'm gonna do it a little bit wider and then i'm gonna add some little [Music] curls just to make it a little bit more kind of messy looking so here when you add curls obviously you can see it's like a big big mess here but it's really easy to fix just change the radius to something smaller that's probably too small we don't even see but here you can start see okay it's scoring here but i want maybe less girls and affecting more so i'm gonna what i'm gonna change first of all i'm gonna add more random randomization here and what i want to do it's the offset let's play with this so as you can see the offset was at 0.5 that meant that the the curl started at the half of the hair so now it's starting like a one-third and i want to reduce the integral i don't want it so curly so maybe two this is just to add more like to make it look more natural i'm gonna hide that and then we can preview set to four remember four was starting to look very like not not that dense hair so as you can see here we start to get this like nice variation here like the hair it's more separated from the hair strands and that it's what makes the hair look more like you can see here that makes the hair look much much more natural because hair it's not perfect and it's uh it's not just one big volume gets and the surface creates a lot of variation last one is going to be layer 5 and we are going to do exactly the same here because that's the last layer we could even add more like offset [Music] could go a little bit not too crazy but and then we create the curves from the grid surface and these ones we can make them smaller again probably add a little bit more that was 02 okay and then change the region to 5 [Music] you can see here our hair it's looking pretty good so once you're happy with your hair you can select all the layers and then click on finalize here this is an account this is going to convert the curves in here cards because right now if i go to edit mode you can see here it's all curves and you could go and make manual adjustments i mean this technique is just too quick place hair guards but depending on what you want you're gonna probably have to still make some adjustments manually but so far i think it looks good so let's click on finalize here and then we can i'm gonna move that out so i can i can hide the cures and that's how our that's uh that's mesh now i can go to edit mode and you you can see here um all our hair cards and let's go and show the stats to see so we are three thousand three thousand i guess if we if i was doing the whole thing maybe it would be like a ten thousand or so so it's still pretty good in terms of well depending on the game that you are doing or what you're doing but i feel like around 10 000 if it's looking that good as that i feel it's it's pretty good um other things i do sometimes for better renders if i just want to render i add a surface um sorry a subdivision here so makes the hair like more smooth and what i was doing before if you need to optimize it because you went crazy with the resolution and it's too much for what you need you can always come here and do decimate and this is a good way because usually the general form and shape of the hair doesn't change too much so we are 3000 and if we something crazy like 0.1 well yeah that's too much but let's probably try so yeah half i mean it's still looking good even if you for example for a lods at this distance you could even go lower so that's something um that we can take into consideration i was meeting need to quickly place her cards with modifiers and her tool add-on i hope that was helpful please leave any questions in the comments below thanks so much for watching and see you soon you

Channel: Dani Marti

Views: 29,433

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Id: ytafOp2fPIc

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022