How to Make DOPE CG HAIR | XGen Tutorial

hey i'm jay and in this video we're gonna be talking about how to make good-looking cg hair so welcome back to this ongoing series where we're just gonna go through a whole workflow of how i make digital characters on most of my projects these days so this is kind of video three we did the sculpting we did the texturing and now we're gonna be talking about hair this is kind of a huge topic i've had a lot of questions about hair and i honestly don't consider myself like a hair expert so i can you know i'm a little bit tentative at like telling you how to do it but i'm just gonna tell you how i've been doing it so this is what i've done for my last several offline rendering projects and i used it for flex which is a real-time project because hair curves are a thing now so x-gen is what we're talking about in this video honestly x-gen is one of the very few reasons that i continue to use maya for my projects because you know obviously i make characters and i just think it's so good at making hair i just don't want to let it go so if you don't know x-gen is a plug-in that comes with maya now which is great x-chain originally started at disney they developed it for their own feature films and it's been in all kinds of big ones like tangled toy story 3 and zootopia and i don't know if you've seen zootopia but there's a lot of hair in that movie you know it's as good as you're going to get people make feature films with it and it's refined to the point now where people like me at home can make hair you know using generally artistic tools and some technical know-how but we're going to get into it right now and if you don't know anything about x-gen or if you have some experience i think you're gonna learn something hopefully and i'll do that by jumping in and kind of showing you the ropes of using x-gen and maya and then how we can use it on a hair also just a note that i did a more intermediate hairstyle and i recorded that in real time for the patrons so shout out to the patrons thank you so much for supporting me and if you're interested in that sort of thing or you want to learn more consider checking out my patreon so what we're gonna do in this video is first we're just gonna jump over to maya i'm gonna show you how we can get up and running with x-gen and then we'll take that and then we'll make a simple hairstyle using x-gen in maya all right so let's jump over to maya now and get started all right before we get deep into the video and we talk about specific hairstyles i just want to do just like a super quick intro into using xgen in maya so here we are in maya i'm just going to go through the basics real fast so that we can kind of speed through the video this is going to be the hit list of the most important things to know and the most used tools that i'll be using so like kind of the basics all right so if you've never used xgen before or if you need a refresher here you go so here we are in maya step one you have to make a project so you go to project window or set project kind of a weird thing you have to click new and then this thing comes up so here we go test project so this is in the directory where i store my projects for everything that i work on important to know you cannot have spaces in your path anywhere so if you have a nested folders no spaces anywhere maya freaks out x-gen breaks so if you have an x-gen crash uh which is common unfortunately there's like several things that are the most common you know things that will bork a scene and like mess up extreme there's nothing worse than opening up a scene and then your action doesn't work because what happens is and why we're making a project right here is that it stores files like multiple files everywhere and the names are really important and the paths are really important so if you're going to open up your scene later on you need to make sure that you have a project and then that you set your project which i'll show you in a second uh if you're switching around so that it knows where all the paths are okay so that's usually why xgen breaks as you open it and it's got a broken path or like i say if it's got a space in it anywhere and renaming everything like renaming things is like kind of a real pain if you have to do that so just out of the gate here you go what this is called you see i have test and project and there's no space or anything this is called camel casing where you just make the first letter of each word in uppercase that's just kind of an easy rule of thumb to do as you're doing maya stuff is just to keep everything no spaces and just camel case everything so here you go accept now we have a project so if you were switching around you don't have to do this because it this is now the default if i were to open maya but if you're going from project to project you come over here and then you go set project and there's also a recent projects there okay so boom here we go now to make an x-gen hair you have to create a description so let's make a mesh let's just get all the important information right now so just take notes right here at the beginning so we can just breeze through uh using these tools all right so like say this is your your character mesh right here i'll always make a duplicate that will be my scalp mesh okay so here you go boom all right so you can just hide your character mesh now a bunch of reasons to do this to separate them your character mesh depending on what you're rendering in like arnold or redshift or something it's going to have not maya materials what we're going to be doing is painting masks and using the paint effects tool or whatever in maya it breaks it has to have a maya shader so that's kind of step number one you can't paint maps that's another bug that you might run into if you're like hey how come i can't paint this mask it's probably because it doesn't have a basic my material so you just make a scalp mesh you assign a lambert or you just keep it lambert one in maya and you're good to go other reasons to make a scalp mesh it can be lower res than your render mesh because it's just its whole purpose is to have the groom on it and then what you'll do is you just make it not renderable uh you can come into arnold and you can turn off primary visibility you can just turn off all this stuff so there you go so then it just won't render an arnold so now it would just have the hair in some cases you might have different uvs so uvs are important when it comes to doing the groom it does use uvs so you want it nice and even and spread out and also it has to be in zero to one so if we open up the uv editor here is zero to one this is what zero to one means if you haven't heard that before you see these squares like this is one and two and blah blah so this right here is zero to one so if you're doing like u dims it would break so an x-gen mesh has to be zero to one so another reason why a scalp mesh is useful sometimes because maybe your mesh is split up into udem so short answer it's best practice to just make a scalp mesh just get in the habit of doing it makes things easier all right so now let's attach a groom to this so what you do is you come over to generate and then you create a description so now that we're in the description this right here this top naming thing here this is where you name your whole groom and then you'll name things here for the collection so the collections you can have multiple collections in a description you can also have multiple descriptions but like for instance for what we're doing this would be the character so you would just call it like the character name and then i usually put description in there so that when it's in the outliner i know what it is all right so then you can create collection this would just be the test but you know we'll say hair and collection so there you go description collection and then the only thing else that you have to change for what we're doing is you do placing and shaping guides because we're adding guides and we're styling them and that's the method that i use action for then you click create boom so now we're in xgen you see it open up the panel here you go so the next thing that you would do is you start placing guides so up here you can see if you don't already have this uh open xgen would have a uh shelf so i can come over here it says add or move guys boom i'm adding a guide so i can scale this like if i was doing longer hair right now it's longer and then i can click this to sculpt the guides and this is how you move them and in maya with any kind of brushy thing if you hold b and then middle mouse and drag you can make the brush higher so now you can kind of see the like points here right there's like here's a point here's a point here's a point here's a point here's a point right so you can add resolution to this i'll show you right now right here guide tools rebuild you can see it actually says five so if i were to make it 10 boom now it's smoother but if i were to add more guides you have to do each one so it's kind of better to like do a cluster and then if you're going to rebuild i would definitely rebuild all at once and then you'll see once i have several like i can position several at once makes things easier and you also want to be generally the same length right depends on your style but you know just to get things going but once i have several then if i come in here and i start placing some you can see it does like an interpolation now that we have a group it's like copying the length so that's kind of helpful sometimes once once you get going so we are adding guides right and then we're sculpting them to shape them and then i can rebuild them i can drag select hit rebuild 10 boom now it's got more resolution be careful with adding too much like it actually simpler is better really and i'll talk about making smoother hairs in a second but really quick before we move on to that just another couple tools you use all the time so this is add or move right so if i click it adds if i hold ctrl and click the root you see this is happening this is how you move it all right you see it's a little bit weird because you kind of feel like what's happening but that's what's happening is like it's showing you that you selected it and then showing like a little short room on where to put it okay so that's how you move them and then you can just delete them if you want to delete them they're also all of these are also an outliner obviously because maya makes a node for everything so that's how you'd remove them if you need to remove them all right now to actually see hairs that's where density comes in and if i increase the density i can start seeing a bunch of hairs you can see that these are like little tubes then there's the width for hair if you're doing like actual scale .01 is a good place for hair and then typically we'll do a taper we'll do like a root we'll give the hair some thickness this is the profile of the hair if you can imagine so like right here is the root and here's the tip so like by making the um the root smaller it kind of helps blend it right and then i can come over here and like make the root right here it's really thin right but i can just just want to feather the tip here and then it's kind of thick and then we're making the tip smaller too okay and then for the density this is like if you type in 100 this is a hundred thousand typically but if you're doing a real size head 150 200 something like that is a good density i think a human head has like 150 000 hairs on it so that is making the hairs another little thing that might be useful sometimes is you can hit the anti-aliasing button makes it a little bit easier to see right and also what happened when we made an x-gen description is that maya made a hair physical shader that's what we're seeing right now and that's what renders best in the viewport later on if you're going to do an actual nice render of it you'd use the arnold hair shader but it just makes it black in the render view so for styling hair and stuff i'm always using this material and so sometimes i'll end up switching back and forth but here you go so we can really increase this now and then you'd see like once it becomes really crowded it starts to look more like hair all right we'll finish up with adding a couple modifiers so this is what you do right this is the workflow you've made your scalp mesh you're placing the guides uh moving the guides doing all the styling stuff and then you can come in here and modifiers and you can add things like clumping and noise so clumping is really common that's the first thing you'd add almost all the time you get this red error says no clump guides found that's because you haven't done it yet you come to set up maps and then you can choose your density if you hit generate it makes a yellow line where your clump guides will be so you can kind of see the density you're like well i want this to have a lot of clumps you have to click generate again every time to update it so you'll see this is where your hair will be clumping and you're like okay you hit save and then it made clumps now you can always come back in here go to setup maps and change it you know so i'm doing this all the time so you're updating it because this is one of the factors that plays a big role in how the hair looks you can see now already um it looks a little bit more like hair right because it's clumping which hair naturally does so we'll finish up with a couple things then we'll get into the demo so if i click here and i add noise boom now we got some noise on so say for the frequency i go higher and for the magnitude i'll also go higher so here we go now you didn't see much of a difference maybe and i can even go higher oh great awesome glad this happened this is gonna happen to you this is uh i don't know if it's a bug or just a feature of how action works the reason why it uh went away was this defaults to update preview automatically sometimes you have to click this to update it but what happened here is it updated but when the majority of xgen is not on the screen it doesn't uh draw for some reason so you have to back the camera out so there you go now i'll show you this if i go to primitives remember we rebuilt guides to give it more resolution i can also increase the modifier cv count this is the cvs in the hairs so if i up this to 20 you can see what difference it made right now if i go to 40 look it you see all this difference now i didn't change anything with the modifiers this noise i already put in so this is kind of a big deal be careful though because it's going to make your scene heavier if you bake it to curves if you bake it to something else like if you're going to export it to go to unreal or something this like this resolution you know is going to be a lot but it's really important to know because of the kind of hairstyle you might be going for you need resolution in your hairs right and again i didn't change anything in the noise settings i already typed this in but because we didn't have enough resolution in the actual hairs we weren't seeing that detail and i can even go higher and see even more detail like right here you see like here's a point here's a point here's a point right so if i came over here we'll see like a before and after oh annoying right but now they're a lot uh smoother still you can see the little things but now this looks a lot more realistic so if you're doing like certain kind of animals certain kind of hairstyles uh crinkly hair uh yeah you need to know that so let's finish up with a couple maps that are common to create and then we'll jump in and start making some eyebrows okay so we made the guides we made some modifiers we talked about resolutions now let's make a map so in all these little things here you can click this button which is a way to type an expression which we'll get into but you can also create a map so if i click that and we go create map it'll prop me with this and i'll say to keep this organized i always type in what the mask is so like this is a density mask so i'm typing density mask for map resolution higher is higher res 20 i feel like is a good general thing if you're doing something high detailed like lashes maybe you go higher but for the most part this is usually good enough you could go 40 i mean it's not gonna be the end of the world and you set whether you want it to start with white or black so i'll just have this start with black create and there you go so i double clicked my little paint brush thing here you see it already filled it with black it set me up so right here this density mask is saved to disk now if i click save so now that i click save to disk this made an actual texture file an iff file if i'm not mistaken on my disk and that's what's being referenced for the mask now of density so because it's black there is no hairs so now in my artisan paint tool brush thing i can come down here and with my paint brush i can just add white and then click save and then now the hairs are growing out of the white right and then if i did blur and then i blurred this and then i hit save you can see now we have like a little bit of hairs a little bit of hairs and then it gets more thick right so that's how you do hair lines that's how you do transitions by having a mix of black and white so this gives you a lot more control of the detail also obviously like where it goes this is how you would style like eyebrows and stuff so you're going to use masks quite a bit on everything that you do you're going to use a mask and then sometimes you'll even use a region mask or a region map which we'll do in the demo coming up where you actually just use color to determine the direction of hair you'll do that for any hairstyle that's parted alright so that's kind of the basics of x-gen you can just keep clicking your scalp mesh and continue to add descriptions you'll see it automatically says oh you want to add it to your hair collection you go yup and you can just add like eyebrow lashes maybe you have like a bun you know complicated hairstyles you're going to want to break into multiple descriptions to keep it organized and give you a lot more control so you don't have to get it all in one shot and then you can see it's all under here so that's your collection and then here's your descriptions okay so that's just a quick basic rundown of x-gen real quick now let's jump into how i use this to make the hair on my character all right so here we are in the character's head scene see i'm selecting the faces now that we're going to create the brow description on main tip here is to select way more polygons than you think always select more than you think i also used symmetry when selecting these which is another little hot tip then i went over to create the description now don't do what i did i'm kind of dumb here i named the description browse which is not what you're supposed to do i'm supposed to name the collection brows i did it backwards so now all my hair is in the brows description so whoops but you know you get the picture we talked about it already that's what you would do it's not as clean and organized as i would like but then i set it up here did the place and shaping guide so here you go and now we're just gonna start clicking around to uh place our guides the general approach here when placing guides is to start with as few as possible uh and then you're honing it in so it's you know very much the same thing and anything complicated you're just gonna start on kind of the edges or the basics get the length that's what we're gonna establish right is the length and the general direction an eyebrow has a you know some subtle changes in direction so you might want to have to account for that and then you just add guides as you need to refine the shape so i'm just going to place them now and then once i have them placed i'll play with the density and the width so that we have you know somewhat of a preview to know that it's working so i'll just continue to add guys with the brow it is a bit important that the root is coming up and then the hair is bending so it's not just straight and also you'll need to place a few guides as it rolls up the brow bone because if you just have a few guys on the bottom hairs are going to be intersecting with the mesh so you do have to have enough to kind of sculpt the roundness you know of the form because really you can just think that the hairs are just kind of interpolating between guides so the more guides you have the more detailed you can make the groom modifiers are another thing that's kind of the top layer that can break it up you can create complexity very simply that way but in terms of creating the hairstyle and guiding everything that's where the guides placement and direction and the amount of them come in so you can see here generally how many guides i did for the brows not that many then i can just mirror it over and that's pretty easy to do i can just box select my guides and then click the mirror button in the xgen shelf and then it just pops my guides over to the other side so now we got guides on both i can hit update and i can see where it's at all right so now with it mirrored now i'm gonna adjust the density and the width just helps to have it mirrored so that you know it can kind of look a little bit more like eyebrow hair while i hone this in and this can continue to iterate over time but i'm starting to make it look like eyebrow hairs now making it a little thicker at point zero two and then i just did a basic width ramp there you can see the other eyebrow didn't show up because it was off camera so as i update the scene it'll pop on here we are already getting a general direction flow of browse it's just it doesn't have a map to control the density yet like where the hairs will go all right so next step adding the modifiers to add a groom now right now all the hairs are just basic going in the same direction so we're going to add a clumping guide all right then we're going to go over to setup maps we're going to click setup maps we're going to adjust the density until we have you know a fair amount of clumps that the first way you want to do it with your clumping is you want to start with big ones first as you add more modifiers you can make smaller more detailed ones so right now i just want to add clumps so that it feels a little bit more natural so this is always the first step when adding modifiers for me you can see i'm adding a lot with a hundred now 200 maybe that's a little too much so 150 and you can always change this later all right so we'll hit save generated it and there you go already looking a little bit more natural still too uniform obviously but we're going to change that as we go starting now with adding noise to the clump so this is another layer of detail you can do is starting to adjust each modifier so now i'm adding noise in the clump this helps it to break it up again so it's not perfect and you can see how we can add complexity we're already starting to but as we layer things up that's going to be the name of the game is having guides that are easy to adjust and then all the complexity happens down the chain procedurally all right next step is to add our density mask so i'm gonna go over here to the mask section i'm gonna add a map i'm gonna type in browse mask so i know what it is as it saves the file choosing black hitting create here we go now i'll just bring up the paint tool and i'll start painting white so now you can see i'm just starting to shape the eyebrow changing my brush size and starting to make like this eyebrow shape you could also turn symmetry on to have it go on both sides at once which would save some time but right now i'm just torturing myself and doing it one at a time starting to feather it in already so you can see just out of the gate i'm starting to add that little bit of nuance how the hairs are a little bit more sparse as they come towards the center of the head getting that arc then i hit save to save the file to disk and now it's updated it and now it's only growing hairs from where i painted so now that i see it with an update i'm starting to shorten the hairs i scaled the guides down more because i can see like how tall like how much eyebrow hairs are here actually so starting to remove a lot more of the masks you can see as we get closer it really informs the decisions that we're making because we can see it a lot clearer so jumping over to the other eyebrow now after doing some adjustments and now i'm painting this one like i say you could just turn on the mirror function when you paint it in to like block it out and then just add the asymmetry afterwards which is probably the you know that's probably what you should do i just missed it on this one but i would always make sure that they're not identical you know anything that's perfectly symmetrical or identical you know you can catch it and that's something that can make something look cg so i do like that they're different it just makes a little bit more difficult to match it up all right so now after i did the other side i'm actually just going to delete those curves and then mirror over the curves i did on the other side because i've already tweaked them so now here we are with both eyebrows you know looking pretty symmetrical symmetrical enough i can jump in and adjust the mask as much as i want if i need to and i'm going to continue to refine the guides and add them and generally what happens during this stage is i'll be focusing on one brow kind of helps to go back and forth but like if i'm refining the taper on the outside of the eyebrow for instance you know that's kind of a nuanced part that can be a challenge so adding the right guide hairs and tweaking it trying to get a clump i might do that on one brow and then just like you saw me i'll just delete the guides on the other one and then mirror it over which is really easy to do so that way i'm you know making sure that the basis of my guides are the same and then you can always make them different towards the end to make them look a little bit more unique on each side all right we made headway on the brows now we're going to switch over to the eyelashes so what i'm going to first do is select my ring you see i'm making a symmetrical i'm turning symmetry on so i can do the selection on both sides then i'm just going to select some edges here and then do an edge ring and convert it to faces so that's how i'm going to select where i want the groom to be for the lashes now you should grow this selection more than me again that's one of my main tips just always select more faces than you think you need i'm pretty bad at doing that here we are creating the lashes and same deal doing the placing guides and then i'm going to just start putting some guys on here for the lashes always starting with as few guides as i think i need i need it to turn around right the lid and they're going to get a little bit longer towards the outside so right now i started with five one in the middle two on either side and then i'm doing the lower lashes the same once i've added them i can select them and scale them down so that the lower lashes are shorter and i'm also going to make the inside lashes a bit shorter then with this little sculpt brush i'm going to start positioning them and curling them down and you can see by me selecting guides it makes a mask so that i'm only affecting those so that's how i'm curling up the upper ones and making sure that the lower ones stay put you can also make your brush really big and just be on the outside so you can just get the tip of the curls there's kind of a it's it's like a nice feeling to move the guides they did a good job with the brush and how it works all right so now i'm going to add a little bit of density so we can actually see these hairs now that we have them styled a little bit adding enough then playing with the width to get it back down making a little bit thicker than the brows at this moment just so i can see them and then playing again with the taper definitely with lashes you want to taper out the tip for sure and then increasing the density a lot i want her to be very lashy this character but you know i think that's pretty common but yeah people will vary character to character like with women sometimes they're adding things to make it feel even more lashy sometimes it's fake lashes and then generally it's more lashes on top than on the bottom so i created a lashes mask by creating a map like we did before and now i'm just going to go around the edge i'm turning on the wire frame so i can actually see the form that i'm painting and then i didn't even choose a high resolution you could go a lot higher than me if you wanted eyes are typically low um like in texal density in the uv so you might need a bigger resolution than you think for lashes and i'm just going around the lid now you see i just changed my value because of what i said the lower lashes i want fewer hairs so instead of painting white i'm painting sort of a gray for the lower lashes all right i saved it to disk it updated so here's the start of my lashes now i have to do this to the other side definitely one of the defining characteristics of lashes is their clump so we're going to go to the modifiers add a clump move over to the side so i can play with the density i don't really want a ton of density i just want to make sure that like several lash hairs are clumping together you know and then maybe there's a few that are apart but that's really what makes lashes look like lashes is their clump size you can see now it's already feeling better even though this is just a first attempt adding a little bit of noise to the clump which i like to do again just breaks it up just so it's not perfect perfect you know i have a little bit of frequency and correlation is just something that tells it whether or not the hair should in like influence be influenced from the noise from hair to hair so it's not every hair is totally random so hairs that are near each other are a little bit more similar so it helps to make things look a little bit more natural not just super wild and random all right so now that we did that work we're gonna mirror the guides of the lashes over to the other side and then i'm gonna update the mask too to paint to the other side which i didn't do again because i'm dumb all right so we can further refine this we're going to jump back into the clumping settings i'm going to make the clump amount higher so now we're getting a little bit more frequency of clumps smaller ones now i'm adding an expression you see i added a random expression in the clump now i do this a lot you're gonna see this a lot coming up but the clump value right there is essentially telling it one is a hundred percent zero would be no clump it's like opacity but what i just did was i wrote this expression right here rand and then in parentheses the numbers from this to this you can put this in any input field it tells it to pick a number between this and this including those numbers so essentially what i just did is each hair picks a value of how much is influenced by that clump so like i say i do this a lot with a lot of different modifiers so you'll see it more coming up is a little confusing but for me it's just a way to add a naturalism to everything you know because nothing's perfect so it lets me add more and more complexity without adding more and more modifiers and things so i'm just making it so that the clump isn't a hundred percent all the time all right so now after clumps we're going to add a noise modifier to the lashes as well so this helps to add even more break up some naturalism i'm just going to use this to just have some flyaways you know i just want it to again not be perfect but it'll be pretty subtle as far as noise goes again you can see i'm going to be using the random expression in these fields for frequency and magnitude here i just used 0 to 1 from randomness for the magnitude so it goes from not doing anything at all to doing something i'm experimenting even by adding something to the mask parameter so that i can see like again you can think of the mask parameters like an overall opacity you can also paint a black and white map for that if you want to as you can with any of these fields really but you can see they have some flyaway hairs now and this is what i'm after with noise all right so now that we have our elements of our hairstyle so far for the eyebrows and the lashes you know we have our guides we have different modifiers we have the tools now to just refine so i spend a lot of time just tweaking you know like looking at reference and just trying to make it better and better uh make it feel more natural and uh and i spend time doing this just like editing the curves and guides you know maybe like tweaking them maybe adding them um going in and out of the masks if i want to like refine the edge and the shape so i spent a lot of time doing this you know like we keep saying this creativity thing isn't like linear so even though the video seems a little bit linear uh there's a lot of back and forth you know if i feel like fixing something or doing something i jump in and do that but here you just see like just tweaking and stuff so this is the kind of thing i'm spending most of the time doing really you know setting things up like we've been doing that can be kind of fast just like adding the curves and stuff once you know what to do the majority of the time is spent you know fiddling around and trying to make it better so the more time you spend doing this stuff um i think the less time it takes to make it better because in the beginning you're kind of like figuring out what to do and how to achieve certain looks and stuff so so this is definitely the biggest part you know we're skipping through it because it's kind of nonsensical me just changing stuff over and over again but that's what i'm doing i'm just playing with the elements that we've already set up and i'm changing them and tweaking them based on my reference and based on what i'm seeing to try to make it feel better more natural more believable and more to the character that i'm making all right so that was the eyebrows and the lashes so now we're going to go to the main event and we're finally going to give this character some hair so let's do that now i want to take a minute to thank this video sponsor skillshare where you can learn all kinds of stuff including knife skills did you know you can learn knife skills yeah is that weird yeah because we're we're doing 3d art on this channel but you know what my wife and i cook at home i don't know if you know but there's like been a pandemic for a while and so i've eaten a lot at home and leveling up my knife skills turns out to be important and that's some grown-up right there if you if you're sitting around trying to get faster at chopping veg i feel like you hit a really high responsibility and provider level okay so this is some of the premium content that i'm into these days but you can also look into all kinds of stuff like virtual filmmaking and unreal that's dope i mean tracking a camera and everything this is the kind of stuff that i want to be doing soon so the fact that this kind of content is also on skillshare is sick skillshare has all kinds of classes and stuff that you're interested in like for me you know editing and making content and videos that kind of stuff interests me a lot so that's the kind of stuff that i save and i watch but if you're into really any kind of topic that you want to dig deeper in skillshare probably has a premium content version of any kind of subject that you're really interested in going deeper into the first thousand people to click the link down below in my description will get a month of skillshare for free so you can try it out and you can just take some classes for free right now and learn some stuff so go ahead and do that why not and now back to hairy things which you probably don't want in your food when you're making it but you do want in your renders okay whatever back to the back to the video starting off the first step obviously would be to select the faces so we do that again uh turning on symmetry can help also when you're doing like a scalp you could look from the profile view just do a big lasso to start with that's the first step is to select all the faces again remember to select more faces than you think you need and then we're going to create another description now this time for the head and then we start placing guides so this one is a longer hairstyle so i'm placing my first guide and starting to bend it into position and then the second and trying to match up the scale so i'm taking my time here and i'm also focusing on one side because i know i can mirror it over so starting pretty simple here and the goal here is a simple hairstyle that is just down uh and then tucked behind the ear so very natural just hair that grout nothing special just want to focus in on what kind of characteristics we can add with the modifiers to make the hair feel like hair not necessarily like a wig or doll hair or something like that all right so even though we're really early at this stage i'm still going to increase the density so i can start to see what's going on and i'm increasing the cv count two to something i think these long hairs need to have to start bending uh where i'm putting guides so this just lets me cue in on where i need to be putting more guides and just help shape the hairstyle i need to see it so nothing final just quickly adding density and some extra cvs so we can see what we're working on so just going to add more and more guides i'm starting to try to get the swoop here behind the ear which is going to be a thing that i'm going to have to add a lot of guides to be able to do especially because i want to have that side burn or at least like the hair like kind of a little bit below the ear and then have it tucked back so i'll need more guides to do that putting in position you can see it's starting to form now uh but we still have like quite a ways to go we gotta add a lot more curves here all right so we have a lot more curves now we've really tamed the overall shape and form of the hair but you can notice down the middle of something odd happening and that's because the hairs don't know which way to go so we're adding a region map and you saw i just created a map like i normally would do for a mask this time it's a region map and instead of using black and white we're going to use colors so we'll fill the whole thing with red and then we'll use blue you can just choose these primary colors to start with you know you shouldn't be using that many so it's the color contrast that is doing the work here and really what the region map is doing is it's telling which hairs to go with which guides so by making this side blue all the hairs that are in that blue space will adhere to the guides that are also in that space so by doing that we're going to get more of a clean part down the middle what's been happening now is all the like random hairs are starting to like peel in different directions so we need to make more of a clean line down the middle something i noticed that helped my hairstyle here is to come around to the back and actually just clean up how much blue is here i really just need the hairs that are on the top to have that part so i by painting out the red in this area it kind of lets the rest of the hairs follow naturally where the guides are and helps the back of the hair look a little bit more natural so this is what ended up giving me the best clean separation and hairline you can see now how much more natural it is and by making this line between the red and blue area a little bit irregular that helps also the naturalism you know it obviously wouldn't be super super perfect so adding a little bit of zig zag in there is always good all right now that we've got the guides and the part in the hair we want to start adding our modifiers so first one up is clumping per usual and you'll see when i go to set up maps i click guide and so what that's doing is i'm actually just using my guides to be where the clumps are that's determining how many clumps i have then i'm reducing the mask value here you can see i dropped it to point three for now and what that did is open up the tip so i'm just making the clump this first big chunky clump um not so strong where it's making all these sharp tips i really just want to break up the form of the hair into like a few chunks because so far it's perfect right and so on top of this i add a new clump and now with this we're going to get a little bit more detail so we're going to start typing in some numbers here 150 so i'm just getting a sense of how many clumps there would be so it helps to experiment now i'm starting to add noise in the clumping 2 modifier and there now we can see it come to life and we're actually adding noise to the clump so it's not individual hairs by adding noise here to the clumping 2 modifier i'm breaking it off from the main shape so that we're just creating a little bit of detail so that things aren't perfect with a little bit of wave into it a little bit of randomness and we can add more randomness as we go and that's what we're doing now adding the random expression so that it's not all the same amount of noise that way each clump chooses between these values now we're going to break it up even more by adding a noise modifier so we'll turn that on and off just to see its effects the noise modifier is doing it per hair right now so again adding further breakup turning on anti-aliasing so i can get a much better visualization in here but we're really seeing the work that we're doing right now in the detail in the highlight so that's kind of what we're designing here and just trying to add you know believability everyone's hair is so different too it's really important to key in on a single reference of a particular hairstyle or person that you want to use because there's so many different variables it helps to narrow it down so you might have one reference for like style then you might have one reference for hair type alright so we've added our bed of noise you might call it and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to add a second noise and this is what i like to do to do my flyaways there's ways to do your flyaways and noise all in one modifier but i've found it it gives me a lot more control to spread it out so you see what i did right now is i added this expression stray with the parentheses in the mask parameter and what that's doing is saying i want you to mask only the straights this is something that exgen has so i can go up here and set the stray percentage and now what i'm doing is i'm adding noise but it's only affecting the strays and we've determined our straight percentage which you can always change that's what's great about x-gen all of this stuff is non-destructive it's all procedural but by setting it up this way i can just add these random expressions and i'm only controlling the strays so you can see now maybe there's a lot more sprays than we need this is that layer that really helps bring hair to life honestly like i love doing strays and flyaways and there's a million ways you can do it you can layer this up that's another reason why i like splitting it up you could add another noise modifier have that mask to just the strays and then you could add even more randomness another cool thing to do is to add a cut modifier this makes the length of the hairs random so this is really important if you can see the end you don't really see the end of my hairstyle in this example but if you do see the end this helps to make it look like a more natural edge in my case what i'm doing though is i'm setting the random amount to really cut the hair to make it short so it looks like broken hairs and then i'm gonna mask this with the straight hairs too so this coupled with the noise we're getting flyaways and with the cut modifier i'm essentially breaking those hairs which is like a really fun detail i love to have like some short hairs that are just flying off the head that you know that have snapped or something so that they're not all perfectly the same length so just dialing in the randomness you see with the mask on now what we get so it's just another little extra detail on top of everything you can see by adding these modifiers with all this randomness that even though we have a very few amount of guides a very simple hairstyle we're getting something that feels more naturalistic already and that's why i love x-gen because we can go back in any one of these modifiers at any time tweak stuff again all non-destructive i love it and then you can save this as a preset so that if you wanted to add this to another character down the road and save yourself some time you can do that really it's super super powerful and it's one of the main reasons that i make my characters in maya to be honest now you can see that as i'm iterating going back and forth now that i can see the hair and we have our hair like penetrating her ear i need to add more guides and that's going to happen as you refine the process but you remember our first clumping modifier we used the guides so i need to jump back into that first one generate it from the guides again and then save it and then that will update because is only making clumps from the guides at the point that we generated it so as i add more guide curves i need to update the clumping that was a lot of keywords i hope i got that right but i think you get the gist you can see that this area here um where her i'm just gonna call it sideburn hair is going through her ear so i'm going to continue to add guide curves and refine this but actually what we're going to do that ends up fixing this is adding a density mask so that's something that you know is a little bit unconventional that i'm doing it this late in the game that might be something that on your hairstyle you're starting like much earlier but because i selected all the faces my hairstyle was generally okay but now i need to come in here and actually paint a naturalistic hairline so we're going to do that now we're going to come around the head i'm going to paint a hairline that's a lot more naturalistic might want to blur and use darker values around the temple you can get a really creative and detailed with this which is can be fun to do like making the little baby hairs um you know really creeping in the hairline depending on ethnicity uh hairlines are very specific so it's a great detail to have you don't really see it in my hair example here that i'm making but you can see that i'm generally making a natural hairline and i'm blurring it really what was going on is there was hairs you know on some faces down below that were just too far from the guides so here i did i just mirrored my guides over uh from one side to the other because i added a lot more to do the hair tucked detail uh and then from here i can just start to refine the maps like the region mask maybe tweak some guides on one side maybe remove or add some too so that it's not perfectly symmetrical by adding more guides styling them adding more modifiers or more randomness and parameters adding more clumps with masks so on like just using the tools we did here you can really make any hairstyle you want so this is kind of a simple one i also made a more intermediate style one for the members of the patreon but you can see hopefully already the power of using action to make hair and really the possibilities are endless alright so that is how i made my hair style in 3d for this demo and how i've been making my hairstyles on pretty much all of my recent projects definitely if i want to make the best quality hair i can make this is the tool i use this is the workflow i use and some of the techniques that we covered in the video the ability to make really high quality hair at home is something i've been wanting to do for years so the fact that we have a tool of this caliber is important and huge again you can go super deep um and there's a lot of randomization if that you can tell because of how the procedural nature works so getting really specific hairstyles can be a struggle and honestly it takes a long time to do like a really good one you know we're talking hours and hours and hours so if you're interested in making cool hair for your characters and if you have maya please play around with x-gen um there's kind of a steep learning curve i think that people are worried about but really just get in there and start messing around and you're gonna see the power and you can use it for all kinds of stuff by the way disney's been using it for like foliage you can use it for feathers you can use it for trees i mean it's kind of crazy the possibilities are endless i hope you learned something in the video and you get to take something away that you can use in your own work to make your characters cooler or whatever you're working on so thank you very much for watching the video getting this far in the video i appreciate that and again for those that are interested in just going deeper into some of these subjects going super nerdy consider checking out my patreon we got 3d models over there as well as like exclusive tutorials real-time demos it keeps growing every month so check it out i got some big projects going on in the background that are taking up a lot of time eventually we'll be making videos with that kind of stuff too so stay tuned but we're going to keep this series going too we'll talk about rendering this kind of hair and marmoset we'll talk about rendering it in arnold's and we'll probably export this and go to unreal too i'll just try to take this girl demo all the way and show a bunch of techniques that i use in my projects and answer a lot of your questions that i get in the comments if you have a question that you want to know more about drop it in the comment below and i'll do my best to get to it thank you again and i'll see you in the next video peace [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 8,227

Keywords: xgen, xgen tutorial, cg hair, xgen hair, maya hair, character hair, 3d hair, maya tutorial, character art, hair curves, modeling hair 3d, how to make 3d hair, hair in blender, blender hair, jhill, jhill tutorial, character modeling, 3d character, how to make cg hair

Id: hvNcRaPmWoE

Length: 47min 24sec (2844 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021