Creating a REALISTIC Hair Shader in Blender!

so you have given your character the best groom you can and now you just want an awesome render but your hair looks something like this let's create an awesome realistic hair Shader inside blender but first let's do some settings in our particle system if you see these heavy fat hair in your render you have to make them thin first go to your particle Tab and under it go to hair shape decrease this diameter value to something more appropriate and for extra realism add some value for the tip as well when you lower the thickness of the hair now it's time to increase the hair count under children please do not give too many particles because otherwise you will smell something burning inside your computer when you are satisfied with the thickness and hair count copy the settings in other hair particle system as well keep this in mind if you make the thickness very low and increase the hair count very high it will starting to look like cotton or very soft hair now the settings out of the way let's begin with the good stuff the hair Shader in my case I have a separate mesh for his hair so I select the mesh and add a material name it hair let's give a dark color for the viewport display color for better visual representation now I am splitting my view for the material editor on the first view I have the render preview on and other cited's material editor let's delete this basic principle Shader and add a principal hair Shader leave the main roughness to 0.3 and change the radial roughness to high something like 0.5 you can also change this coat value it determines how much shine you want on your hair I am leaving it at zero before doing anything let me show you that hair is not uniformly color all over it has some color variations and some few hairs are white too in order to achieve that we will use noise texture node plug its Factor value to the color socket of our principal hair Shader and add a color ramp node in between it let me preview the node itself you can do it by hitting Ctrl shift plus left click this option is available when you enable the node Wrangle add-on now you can crunch the sliders to contrast the color you can also change the colors as well like here I am giving it a dark brown shade increase the noise scale now it's working much better adjust the slider according to your needs now I am adding another slider to add some few light color hairs giving a good light color adjust the slider to make it visible we want only few hair in light color now plug the principal hair back to the material output you can see slight color variations starting to appear in the hair if you want more you can adjust the slider further now the most common problem in blender hair is roots are not looking good in the real hair you can notice that there is a slight fade in the skin to hair you can see more references to achieve this in blender I will use curve info node but let me first show you what we will be doing I added a mix node and plugging it in two emission shaders one in black and other in white now take the intercept input and plug that in the factor value of the mix Shader here you can see the hair roots are getting a black color so if we put a transparent Shader instead of this black emission and add our principal hair Shader instead of the white emission Shader we will get the fading effect we can later tweak the colors with color amp node now I am plugging the transparent Shader in the top slot and our hair Shader in the bottom here you can see the fading effect is working but it's too much I will adjust it with the color amp node so the basic hair Shader is done now I will move to this type of color variation where the hair which are close to the Head having a lighter color and as it goes to the tip it gets darker to do it I am adding a mix node and set it to color plug it between color amp and hair Shader now again take the intercept input from the curve info node and plug it to the factor of the mix node plug the color input to b instead of a and change the color of a to lighter shade of brown [Music] we cannot able to see the affect so add a color amp node here to Crunch the contrast [Music] I am changing the curve type to be spline for the smooth flow this effect will be very subtle now there is a slight light color on the roots of the hair now our realistic hair Shader is done I am adding the same technique for the beard Shader the beard is groomed on the head mesh itself so select the head mesh and add a material name it beard and change the viewport color [Music] let's preview the Shader quickly adding a principal hair Shader then a noise Shader with 800 scale plug factor to color input add color amp node here now same crunch the contrast change the colors add a new slider for some few white hair this time we don't need the fading effect but I need this type of color variation so add the curve info node add color amp and plug that in The Intercept value [Music] adjust the sliders according to the look now we have these two colors I am joining these two with color mix node set it to screen and add both color values now you can see we have all the color information now just add the color information to the principal hair Shader and Shader to material output node change the roughness values as we did previously and you good to go so this is our Shader of beard hair if you created a material and just wanted to assign to the specific hair particle system just select the mesh on which you had generated the hair particles now add material slot and select the correct material then simply go to the particle setting tab select the correct particle system in my case the beard then under render select the appropriate material and you have the material I hope you like this tutorial and learn something from this for more of these blender related videos hit a like And subscribe my channel if you want to learn how I create hair or beard for my characters please watch these videos

Channel: Anèésh Arts

Views: 30,638

Keywords: Blender, Cgi, VFX, Render, Realistic, 3D, 3dartist, b3d, Zbrush, Rendering, CG, 3dmodel, animation, 3danimation, Motion, Graphics, Hair, Shader, Shading, SSS, Material

Id: M2e3hIfbu44

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023