C4D Hair workflow Splines to Guides

hello this is Danny from CG dreams and today this is an update that I'm going to be showing you to a workflow that I'm using for the hair system within cinema 4d in particular this is a workflow in which incorporates use of splines converted to hair guides and then rebooting them back to the scalp so this is why I'm going to be covering and a few little problems that occur that I've now gone around which I'm going to be showing you today so I'm going to keep things quite simple to bring the point across to you so that I can make this video as short as possible which is always a good thing in my opinion when it comes to video tutorials so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to first start off with a good old sphere and then we just look at the display and for our purposes that should be absolutely fine but you know I'm just going to go instead of getting type of sphere something like that would be quite fine for us and then I'm going to just make that editor ball and the next thing is I'm going to go to one of my custom layouts I'm just going to bring this up and this custom layout was something that I made up so that I can gain access to all the hair tools so all the titles that you can be seen in a minute is always coming from our simulator Mandel here these here I've just docked them in different places so if you're not sure where they are then just look for the equivalent tools that I'm going to be using so add hair always use this one here the mode is done where I want to do the sculpting different types of modes and this will be the tips down to the the guides themselves that's what I normally use the tips to the guides tips for the five staff the guides for the big movements in the hair edit there's a couple of things that I might want to be using in here and this is where you find them in here in this particular video I don't think I'm going to be doing any of that I'm going in here probably not nothing in there and hair tools I will definitely be using nothing in there so that's where you'll find all the hair tools in what I'm going to show you next so here they are what I'm going to do is I'm going to first work on the basis of making each selection set so I'm going to go to my live selection tool and just going to select a bunch of polygons here which is going to be my selection set I'm going to keep it relatively even both sides now I'll add a few tips upon selection steps in a minute but first of all let's get through this process so I'm going to make a selection set go to select and set selection normally when I want to grow here specifically from this selection set I will just select it go to the simulate tab and then click on add hair but that's not the way that I want to work with this what I like to do also is I like to just add a material just so it gives me an idea where my selection set is when I haven't got the ability to see it so in this particular case I'll go to the materials and I'll just drag and drop the material in this selection set so it just becomes visible when I haven't got those selection sets selected it will become all clear to you in a minute why so what I want to do is I want to work on the basis of making some custom hair guides based upon the splines rather than just grow the hair and then style it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to split the a good old paint'll and the top of spline I'm going to go forward to bleed b-spline in this particular case it's a good idea to have the snapping turned on and let's just undock this for a minute so we want to enable snapping I don't want vertex snapping but I do want polygon snapping we don't want the object selected it should allow us to snap anywhere from the object so one would do is I'm just going to click and then just draw some guides out there and I'm not going to go too crazy but I'm going to do something that kind of look aside I've actually intentionally made a shape okay so I've got this shape going on here and what I want to do with this is I want to is a clone so I'm going to put this into a clone you notice how it's snapped to the surface of the cap which is exactly what I want in this particular case now this particular hairstyle is not something I would normally make but I'm just doing this to demonstrate something for you so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the mo graph go to the cloner and then drag the spline into the cloner the type of spline that I won is going to be also at the top of clone I want is going to be a radial so it's going to go around the axis is wrong at the moment so I'm going to change the axis to the one that kind of suits in better this particular case it's the X Z and you'll notice here that it's giving me some nice hair they're also say potential hair they're what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the guide the original guide spline just going to take it out the clone for a second and I just want to move this I should have really created it bit more further out for this demonstration there at iwo I'm not going to bother moving it because it's already locked quite nicely to the surface there it helps what I'm going to be demonstrating so it's just pulled it out of place now unfortunately that's okay so we've got the radius and I'm going to set it like that that would be absolutely fine what about the upset let's go for that I think that's all I'm going to do for this I'm going to keep it pretty simple and then what I'm going to do for this is I just want to make it editable by clicking on that top left button as you can see that the C key I'm going to select all of these and add mummy expect to adapt if I want it to be a little bit more uniform and I'll take this number down right click and then go to connect objects and delete so what we've got then is we've got one single spline and that's exactly what I want perfect what I didn't really want is I didn't really want the B spline I wanted to change it up a little bit really but you know what that's absolutely fine for our purposes for the mat minute what I want to do is I just want to pull this out that Colonna null there and I just want to pull this down to the surface so it's touching the surface of the scalp you need to see it start to disappear okay that's good for me make sure that it's all there okay so that's assuming that this is going to be our guides there's not a lot there I have to admit but you can obviously increase the clone amount if you want to what you through from this point is you with the spline selected you'll go to your simulate tab I could go to the other tool so I've got docked on the bomber one bird it from here for you and then we go to the hair edit and we click on convert on spline brilliant now all we do now is we just delete the spline we no longer need it we've got our hair guides exactly what we want next thing to do is you can see in the egg hair guides if that amount is no link there at all now right at this stage it falls to drag my selection set and drop it into your notice that the hair shifts the guide shift so what we need to do is need to make sure that we lock these guides where they are or at least keep them from moving by store in their position so what we do is we open up the Edit tag found in the guides area for the head tag and we click on store and that's great and then we do is we drag and drop our selection set into the link for the guides it will move and then we click on restore and it brings it back to us again the next step is we need to make sure that the hair is routed and you can tell it's not routed because we've got this little tiny green light bulb shape at the end of the guide which tells us that it's not routed we need to do nails we need to root it so I'm going to go to my hair tools and then in hair tools you've got this sick route if you click apply notice these ships you think I'll know this is the what I thought one it's the first time this happened I thought now there's no way of doing this all you have to do is you just simply have to make sure that you just move your object now if you're going to be needing the object to be exactly the way it is which is more likely the case that make sure we just do a keyframe before you move it and move on a couple of frames but you'll notice when you move the object that the hair Springs back into place so it wasn't really the case that it moved it was needed to be updated but it was and I'll just press the ctrl + D key it just brought back the sphere back to the original location anyway but I like to always use the the keyframes to make sure so now what we have which we have proper hair guides that are generated originally from a spline that was made through a clone and now we grew it to the point where it's actually part of the scalp this is really brilliant because it now means that we can use our normal health grooming tools and then start to style our hair in this particular case I want to make sure that the hair mode is set to guides for bigger changes I like to sort of change it like that and and there you go that's really it the other thing to mention is is that in your guides you'll most likely have the route sections a custom or two spline and it was before when I make sure that you want to grow from polygon area the amount you could increase if you want I'm going to leave it as what I left it as the sequence you definitely way may want to increase this but I recommend that you kind of increase this as and when you need to because you can make really big nice volume changes very very quickly and smoothly and if your computer is lagging a bit then you may want to have these segments down and then just bring them up a little bit higher if you need them another thing as well is there's in the settings there's an ability to even out the distribution of the guides and this may be the case sometimes and that's to see if I can find it here I'm normally used to go into the menu for this particular thing in our even segments when you click on even segments what it should do is it should basically even out the space between them sometimes when you're doing big changes one particular area it will stretch out the distance between one one guide point to the other the next thing is you need to go to the hair area you'll notice that the count for the count with the head and segments are void the completely gray Dell this is because in the roots it's set to as guides just need to go to it select polygon area and then boom it all back when you're going to go to your render you want to make sure if you've got quite long hair to have these segments quite high I've always going to look pretty rubbish now when you're going to the editor and you want to seek on some kind representation of what the heads going to look like make sure that when you go to your hair lines that you keep it pretty low so that your system performance can handle it in my particular case I'm pretty happy with that if I just go for a just a quick render you'll notice that you'll get absolutely nothing and this is because of the way in which we actually made our hair so what we do is we go to our materials we go create we go to a shader and here you'll find our hair material with drag and drop that on a hair tag and now our hair will render and I'm going to go through styling things in this particular video but needless to say you can see here that the power is there for us to really manipulate the hair and get something going pretty quickly based upon guides you can imagine what you're going to be able to do when you really do work at something and get those initial splines the really perfect shape that you want a nice flow maybe over the fringe you want a nice flow and that's really it for this video you can see here how we've managed to earn to start from splines and work our way to getting proper hair guides on your geometry so I'm going to leave it right at this particular point and just say thanks for watching and hopefully the next time that you see another video like this it's going to be very similar but it's going to be more refined we're actually going to go for a proper realistic good quality hair style just want it before I go if you are creating right here which is kind of similar to this you don't need to necessarily go to the point of adding hair guides all over the selection set area like this you only need to really have hair guides really coming from at the safe instance here so we're just good to come round okay this is going to cover the whole of this area here there's no need to keep on creating layers upon layers upon layers upon layers another little tip to mention is is that when you do have really silky kind of smooth hair in the hair geometry what you want to do is you want to make sure that for the head in the cloning have at least some clones in there the reason why you would want to have some climbs in there with a root set to zero and your tip set to zero is because this helps merge in the intersections of hairs that you may be getting in rendering problems you may get some hair intersection intersecting and it will cause some problems visually by doing this and set in a little tiny bit of frizz just a little bit even on a really smooth hair style you can still have a little bit of frizz you'll find that you get much more realistic looking hair and the same for the thickness you know you want to start off I like to start off with so naught point five for the thickness I have a nice route going down but what I do is I will hold down the ctrl key click once they not have it just a little bit thinner at the roots and then what this does is it will give you a much more better look at the ropes as it kind of renders L so I'm just show you this the first couple of settings there and your hair will look much more realistic alignment even style this hair so there's a couple of tips anyway for you to get going and of course you can watch my other videos on the case of the general so I will stop the video now and say goodbye

Channel: CGDreamsTutorials

Views: 21,745

Keywords: MAXON, C4D, CGDREAMS, CINEMA4D

Id: yinvhLIuaGE

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2017