Create Eyebrows in Maya using XGen

hey guys it's monica at academic phoenix plus and welcome to another xgen tutorial in the last video tutorial we talked about how to create curly hair which you can see in the description below as well as up there on top of the video and this time we are going to be talking about how to create eyebrows we've already spoken about x-gen especially using create interactive groom splines but what happens if we want to specifically place x-gen hair along a particular direction and also in a particular area so in this video tutorial we are not going to be using the interactive groom splines we are going to start off by creating our own description but first let me turn this part off let me grab some eyebrows so this is my low poly model i am going to smoother just so that i can get an um a little bit higher mesh and then i am going to duplicate her so ctrl d and then move this one aside i'm going to assign a lambert to it so their original lambert is just fine and what i want is just the geometry for the eyebrows which is basically along here so i have a lot of mesh to get rid of and i'm going to turn on symmetry so it does the same thing to the other side so there's a couple ways you guys can do this we can actually just extract the hair or the eyebrow uh that we need the eyebrow mesh that we need so i'm just going to go ahead and just select those and i might as well go all the way over here and then what i can do is just shift make a big selection and then delete up looks like i missed something in the back no problem delete that as well all right so now i have my eyebrow geo which is exactly what i'm going to call it eyebrow geo and i'm going to place this back into the zero now if you would like you can always bring these out a little bit just so we can see it and i can always place it back as well i'm going to open up the attributes and actually it's going to be helpful if i just go up here to maya classic and go to xgen now as you can see whoops there it goes let me go back so now that i'm in xgen the first thing it's going to ask me is hey would you like to create a new description and i actually do so let's create a new description and it's going to ask me we need to select a polygon surface so here is my eyebrows perfect create a new description and i am going to call this the eyebrow description this is going to be a new collection which is fine splines are fine randomly across the surface is fine and i'm also going to be placing them individually so make sure you get that selected and then click on create this is going to create a separate window which is where we want to start placing our own splines so right now our density is at one which isn't very much and then there's a modifier cvs and this is actually the width of our object and here's the length so we're going to start by i'm actually going to center this pivot here just because it's kind of bugging me press q so i don't see it anymore now i am going to go to the outliner and you'll notice that we have a collection here and a description one this description is in fact the hair so if i hide this you will see that the curly hair disappeared all right going back to xgen you'll notice that it's got a couple of points there but we can actually start placing our own points so over here to on the list of x-gen things to do one of them is adding a point and then you can see the scale of it and it's huge if i want the scale to be a little bit smaller i can just hold down b middle mouse and drag which will give me a little bit smaller scale and i could start placing points so usually i start off with one you can see how massive it is then another and then another one along here so you'll notice that they stick out and if you want to see what a preview looks like you can click on this little eyeball with a little arrow circular arrow you can click on that and it'll create hair now obviously it's a little large and there's a lot of issues but again we're just kind of messing around right now we're just kind of getting started so one we might want to reduce the length so you can see we have control here and we can also play with the taper which of course we want to go ahead and increase but then we also want to play with a start taper so it's not so um big and then what i'm going to do is grab these individual strands and you may have a challenging time here but go ahead i'm going to grab this and then i can also do a scale them [Music] so i'm just going to scale in uniformly so they're a little bit lower now i can click on this to see a preview of it and you can see how much it's changed i'm going to turn off the preview because i'm not ready for that just yet and you may be wondering what about the other side don't you want to mirror to the other side i will once i am ready but just to demonstrate to you guys over here to the on the buttons you can click on this one which will mirror it to the other side now i'm not ready because i actually want to um make some changes here we'll just click on this when we're ready all right so the next thing is we're ready to start manipulating these pieces so when you select it in the x-gen bar we already played around with the move and things like that but there's also another bar here so this one's the interactive toolkit and this is the one that we're using right currently so what we can do is grab this one which is the sculpt guides versus this one is the sculpt the hair so right now we're going to be sculpting the guide so i'm going to click on this little guy and you'll notice that i can now change the direction of the curve which is exactly what i want so what i'm going to do is start building the direction of the eyebrows which looks something like this and then you know make sure you look at it in multiple directions we can also grab the other two which i am and i'm going to grab the sculpt tool and again i'm just going to start shaping the direction just like this all right it's looking good so far that's going to give me a direction again i can bring this one down and again make sure that it's facing the direction of the object again you can click on preview to see what's going on and you'll notice that the hair is forming around the shape which is great but we definitely need more guides so again i'm going to turn off the preview and then create more guides so i'm clicking on the little plus sign here and i'm going to add them and you'll notice that lucky for us by adding extra points you'll notice that it follows the other guides so this is great you don't have to do sculpting all the time you just have to start it and then you can tweak it from there i'm going to grab all these guides and i am going to go into the channel box here and there is a width which i'm going to change to 0.02 so there or maybe 0.03 and then go back to exgen it's a little windy outside so if you hear something banging is my plants that are hanging are like being banged against the window so i hope it's not too distracting all right now that i have these i can now take the tool and start tweaking this as well so these should be kind of pointing a little bit more inward should still be flowing towards the outer edges but i just want to make sure there's a little bit of lower curvature same thing for this one we might want to nudge these up and this one i want actually to be a little closer here i do want to make them a little thinner so i'm going to bring them in and just kind of scale them and again this may move something so i will use the move tool and or the move guides tool or sculpt guys that's the official term of the tool and just kind of bring them back out i definitely don't want any penetration on the geometry this one really fell in there all right let me get that out make sure that's going okay whoops that one disappeared again [Music] now you may be wondering why aren't we using um hair and try to do all the stuff with it the reality is is that trying to comb hair to look exactly like that would be really challenging all right so i'm going to add more guides i'm starting to get a nice look here i'm going to add a couple more guides just kind of make sure that i'm feeling that space so if there's any questions or doubt extra knows exactly where to put that hair so this i'm going to individually try to select the ones that i just made let's go back here i'm going to change this to 0.02 [Music] i'm going to scale them so they're a little smaller [Music] and then again i'm going to start guiding them so this will take a little bit of time a little bit of patience but it's going to look realistic and that's basically what we want all right we can click preview now again we only have a little bit of density we can increase our density and you can see that well ignore the left sides a bunch of spikes but you can see that it's starting to work and of course i'm probably going to add a lot more uh density but right now i'm just kind of working on what i have over here we can work on the thickness as well so let's go ahead and move these around so that it looks a little bit thinner so you can see that i can make this thinner using these pieces so you don't have to just focus on taper and everything you can actually use these as well to make your edges thinner so i'm going to make it look a little bit more like hair and don't worry i understand that it's kind of fuzzy and some of these are very long and i have to sculpt them still and this side looks crazy all right so these end up being very long so i'm going to go ahead and grab these guys and scale them and you might want to rotate them so again they can be moved around just like a regular piece of geometry so you might want to rotate them a little bit and then of course you want to shape them you can just make him a little smaller and then sculpt so the results this area is a little bit shorter and everything else is slightly longer cool all right does that look like eyebrows to you [Laughter] all right let's add a couple more guides i'm going to turn off the preview [Music] and again i'm just going to add a couple more just to kind of help with the the guides so again just grab the ones you just made go to the channel box and change this to 0.02 any of them that you want to make shorter go ahead and do so so i might want to make that one shorter i want to make maybe this one a little bit shorter that's perfectly fine and then you can start drawing the guides making sure that they're going the correct direction that you want them to go now we do have some eyebrows that are a little bit shorter starting at the beginning so i'm going to add a couple guides here and these actually are going to be fairly small pointing slightly upward now let me grab here and change this to 0.02 like we've been doing just maybe pointing a little bit upward so as you can see the left side's a little interesting so i'm just going to select these guides and delete them then i'm going to select these guides the ones that i like and then mirror them to the other side now let's take a look at the preview i am going to increase my density to about a hundred i'm probably going to increase my density even more but right now i'm just kind of looking at the direction of the hair again i can go in here and just make them smaller still so i feel like they're still a little big and round so i'm gonna make them a little smaller and the length seem a little long so i might play with that as well so i'm gonna increase this to 150 the eyebrows are coming along and let's talk about what do we do with all of this extra hair that we have well what we want to do is we want to select the mesh there is this density mask right here there's a little arrow pointing downward if i click on that i can create a mask and what i can call this is my eyebrow density mask and i'm going to increase my resolution to 25 and just like any mask anything white you're going to see anything black is not you're not going to see so i'm going to change the start color to black and then create so you'll notice that the hair basically disappears now i'm going to turn off the preview for now and you'll also notice that i get a new paint brush and a new tool over here to the left this is the density mask and the controls to start it i can press save and then here is the actual tool itself so i have it active and i can double click on it which will open up the tool settings and it looks just like a regular brush size so i'm gonna make my brush size like around point two might make it just a tiny little bit smaller so 0.15 i do want it to be solid i'm not really interested in softness so i'm going to make it a solid brush i'm going to color white because i want to add white because right now black you don't see anything white you'll see it i'm going to collapse flood because i can get that confused and then i might mess around with that and the rest looks pretty good so just going to scoot this over to the left and what i'm going to do is basically draw the eyebrow i am using a stylus so that might be a little bit easier for me so what i'm doing is just kind of adding in the white part so this is the area that you are going to see now going back to this i want to sculpt a little bit better so i'm going to change my color to black i might make this into just point one because i want to sculpt it a little bit more so i can start getting a little bit more of that fine detail i want this tail to kind of you know i'm going to fade away so paint that in and when you think you're in a good place click on save and you'll see that then the hair only follows that section and if you want to get out of the brush you can just turn off the brush here and now you're back oops just get out of the tool and there you go i'm going to hide this just so you guys can see [Music] all right let me bring that back okay we also have to do it to the other side so let's grab the brush again i am using the white color i'm going to paint in the eyebrow so it's up to you what type of you know eyebrows your character has some have arcs some have if you want to make him look a little bit more uh older for example old people have tiny eyebrows that they have a tendency to draw really tiny eyebrows and younger kids have a tendency to have uh bushy eyebrows so it's really up to you how you want your character to look like to look like all right click save turn off the tool all right you can turn off here you can see that the guides are not there anymore so we can see what's going on with our guides and then we can bring them back let's open up the hypershade and you're going to see that we have hair shader and another hair shader right so these are the the first hair is for my curly hair so you might want to go in and make sure that you label things as like curly hair curly hair shader because otherwise it gets confusing and this is going to be the eyebrow hair and eyebrows are usually darker so what i'm going to do is just go in and just kind of darken the highlights and everything's because eyebrows have a tendency to be darker so i'm going to go ahead and darken them i really don't need too much of the highlight it can be a little bit more scatter i'm going to reduce the transmission but at the end what we're looking for is a little bit less glint a little bit more darker color i'm gonna go back to my ex gen so here's a render and you can see that uh the eyebrows are there but they're certainly looking very strong there so let me go back and i'm going to reduce the length a little bit so again it's a little bit of a of a practice and a test i'm going to change my modifiers a little bit to six and i'm going to make the taper all the way and maybe reduce the taper start and i think her eyebrows are a little too dark so i will go back into the hyper shade and just lighten them up a little bit so again we have our curly hair our base shader uh let's see where is our eyebrows there it is just gonna lighten it up just a little bit all right the eyebrows are coming along i think i put too much in so let me go back to my xgen and reduce my density to 150. i'm going to make a selection just so that it render only this area still look very thick so i'm going to go ahead and thin them out using this handy little tool right here so just got to figure out what the right length is i do want the ends of the hairs to be thinner i think the length is a little long so i'm going to reduce it to one point actually just one it's looking better i'm going to make them just a little bit thinner just because i want them to be fine here it's really up to you and your character how thick and thin these hairs are all right now i'm going to tweak the length i'm starting to like the way it looks all right and now i am going to render the whole thing with i'm going to bring back the other hair and now i'm going to also bring back this so we can look at the whole character as a whole it's kind of funny to see the hair all blonde but really it renders out dark brown it's just it's funny the previews don't are not perfect it's just a lot of information in the hair so let's see what our character looked like before so there she is without any eyebrows and now let's see what she looks like with eyebrows [Music] and there she is with eyebrows now i'm revisiting the idea of making them longer again i can make a little bit a little bit thinner i'm going to tweak it just a little bit mine increase my density a little bit more might increase the length a little bit more again it's always a little bit of a you know you're adding more and more to it until you you're happy with what you have so that being said let's see what that looks like [Music] and there you have it eyebrows you can see there they're going to a particular direction is only impacting that particular area and we now our character now has eyebrows all right and here is a render without the hair definitely looks better with hair but at least now you can see the eyebrows and the direction that they're heading so hopefully you guys found that helpful let me know by leaving a comment below i always appreciate your comments um we went over several things in next-gen so hopefully this will give you a bit more control over how to manipulate exgen hair in the next video tutorial i am going to go over how to create extra eyelashes and it's a very similar process so thank you again for spending the time with me i really appreciate you watching this video if you if you found it informative or you learned something please like and of course subscribe and if you think anybody like your friends or family could use this in their art please share that is uh that's always a wonderful way to show me that this is helpful is by you guys sharing my videos so again thank you so much for watching i know that there's a lot of other video tutorials out there so i'm truly grateful that you're you are watching these videos with me if you guys get a chance take a look at academicphoenixplus.com where you can sign up for my newsletter and you can also download free videos free tutorials free 3d models free trainings and so much more so take a look at academicphoenixplus.com again thank you so much for your time keep creating and i will see you next time

Channel: Academic Phoenix Plus

Views: 1,970

Rating: 4.8909092 out of 5

Keywords: maya fur, maya 2020 fur, maya 2020 xgen, maya xgen, how to, video tutorial, maya 2020, autodesk maya, introduction to xgen, xgen basics, quick tips, quickly make hair, create, quickly 3d, introduction xgen, create hair in maya, character, 3d, cg, xgen, easy, basic, tutorial, eyebrows, description, guides

Id: iKD2G2MiLI4

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021