How to use Blender New Hair System with No Geometry Node Knowledge

I already made a full hair tutorial in blender you can check it out on the top right corner but that was using particle system now I'm going to show you how to do it in the new hair system which uses geometry notes geometry notes are great since you can make a lot of cool things with it but since it's relatively new I'm sure there are a lot of people that don't even know how to work with it properly specially people who just want to make characters they don't want to get drowned into thousands of notes that's why I made this system that gives you a lot of option with only a few clicks and it requires zero knowledge of geometry notes so you can go straight to creating hair without spending two hours connecting notes together stick around to see how it works but first we're gonna go over the basics of the new hair system from adding the hair to grooming it and other stuff so if you know the basics skip to the next part let's go select the mesh shift a and in the curves click on empty hair we can't see anything right now so Ctrl Tab and go to scalp mode this is scalp mode is different than the original in this one we do the hair first one we got is the add tool under top we got radius which is the size of our brush you can also press F and drag to the left or right to change the size then we got count count as the amount of hair you want to place at once if you put it on one and hold click it places the hair in the direction of the mouse if you increase it to two it places two Hair by each click for example if you want to make something really hairy like these balls you can increase the count and spread the hair all over the mesh in the curved shape we got few options length is the length of the hair the less amount you put in the shorter the hair is going to be in the bottom we got Points each hair strands made out of points more points equals more flexibility for example if I put one with eight points then try to groom it then make another one with 30 points and groom it you don't see any difference because we gotta go to the render properties and in the curves change the shape from a strand to strip and add a few additional subdivision to smooth out hair curves now if I squeeze the hair in the left you see it doesn't bend very well due to its low Point count but in the right if I squeeze it down it bends on lot of areas because it has lot more points and the curve shape we also have an intercept section we got three options first one is linked if you enable this one you see the length in the bottom gets disabled because now length is calculated by your distance on the closest hair strands you already have for example if I put three hair strands with different length then enable this option every hair I put in the length is going to be something in between closer you get to a hair the length is going to be closer to that one as well now if I shape these hair strands and enable shape and point count just like length it gets the shape and point count from the closest hair strand gonna like keyframes in animation where you place two keyframes and the software calculate the frames in between just remember to hold click for it to work properly in the active tool we got other settings spacing is the distance between each hair strand so if I decrease it we get more hair strands in the line lower the number the closer they get to each other you can also change the stroke method to other things like line when you hold click and draw a line it places the hair based on the spacing next we got the lead brush which is obvious what it does it removes the hair strands density brush is amazing when you click on it for the first time it's on auto mode which means it removes and add the hair strands based on the distance you put in you can change the distance on top but better way would be pressing shift R and drag to the left or right you see some dots appear on the screen which tells you the amount of hair in that certain area if you drag to the left dots gets closer together if you drag to the right dots get away from each other when it was at your desired density you can click one time to close it now when you start drawing the same amount of air will appear on the mesh you can also enable the interpolate here as well for it to stay on the same shape as the other hair strands when it's on auto you can shift out again and drag to the right to get the dots further from each other now when you draw on the surface it removes the hair strands and only leaves the amount of hair you want if you just want to remove the hair strands you can switch it to minus or switch it to Plus for when you want to add hair strands moving on to the cone using this tool you can groom the hair based on the size of your brush if you don't want to move the hair strand so intensely you can decrease the strength so you have more control over the movement of the hair one tip for better grooming is to click and drag outside of the hair so it moves the top half of the hair smoothly without any harsh edges then we got a sphere and projected default is on sphere which means it moves the hair based on its position it only moves that the specific hair that you're grooming and the hair strands around it so if you move the hair in the front the hair strands in the back will be untouched but when you switch to projected it doesn't care about the distance anymore instead it moves everything based on the brush so when you click and drag the hair everything in the brush area will follow the brush without considering distance we also have falloff you can change the shape of the brush for example if you drag this down brush gets pointier and pinches the hair in the middle you can mess around with it and experiment with different curves to see if it's useful next will be a snake hook using this one you can stretch out each hair strand to whatever height you want just drag the tip of the Strand and straight created to any direction you want there is no limit but the count it will get junkier and rougher on the edges when you stretch it too far grow and Shrink is the next one it's pretty useful as it sounds on default it increases the length of the hair strand but if you go to active tool settings and switch the direction to subtract now when you click and hold on the hair it's getting shorter and shorter next one is pinch what it does is that it pulls the hair strand close to where you hold the click this is very useful but when you want to add some irregularities to the hair especially beard because in a lot of people beard is messy and goes all over the place using this one you can pull a bunch of hair strand to a direction you want really fast puff is kind of obvious when you have a bunch of hair clumped together tightly you can puff it up using this tool and untangle it smooth brush comes in when you're already messed up you bend the hair too much and it's all tangled up to each other smooth brush runs up the edges and make this strand smoother resulting to much cleaner hair strand but remember it only works good with lower Point counts so if you have too much point in your hair strand it might not work as well next one and one of the most important tools is a slide tool using this tool you can move the whole strand to a different location from its roots this is really good for defining the hairline and getting a cleaner edges let's not forget about selection tool first make sure show overlays is enabled so you don't get confused like me then when you click and draw on these hair strands they stay white while the other hair strands will turn gray now when you pick up comb you can only groom these hair strands and it won't affect the other ones this will come in handy when you have tons of hair in one place and you want to start only few hair separately than the other ones another thing that help with the selection is to switch the select mode to curve this way when you click on a hair strand full hair strand will be selected so you can easily select any hair strand you want by clicking on it only one time then start grooming it that's the wrap for the basic tools now it's time to move on to the geometry notes now here's the hair system I made using geometry notes that you can download on my gumroad for free also data to both of these channels for their great tutorials I made each frame a different color so it would be easier to access also made the most important notes a brighter color than the frame so if you don't even know a single thing about geometry notes you can easily look for the colored notes I also made another version which is similar but I brought out all the settings to the modifier section so you can easily access the hair settings straight from the modifier settings something like the old particle system you can download this one as well as the practice file on my gumroad and patreon Page Link in the description now let me show you how it works I brought out my head for example I also made a couple of hair on the top and we are going to use it as a test subject first go to file append and double click on the blend file I included in my gumroad go to Note 3 folder in there you find the node named main hair double click on it to import now click on the hair and in the modifier properties click on this icon and choose main hair in the render properties make sure the curves is on Strand and you have at least two additional subdivision now how are your master to the top left corner and drag out a new window click on this icon and change it to Geometry nodes now we got all the necessary nodes ready in only few clicks first find stick to the mesh section in the object info click on the Picker then click on the head what it does is it is stick the roots of the hair to the surface of the head so it wouldn't fall off then first one in the left we got hair mounts by increasing the amount number it adds hair strands between the hair and make it Fuller I'm not going to increase it too much so we can see what we're doing for the next notes in the bottom we got the spread using this value right here we can increase the distance between the hair strands and spread them all over the head next one will be points count in this one you can change the amount of Point count of each hair strand for example if you put one we get a straight line that doesn't Bend and goes through the head two will be a bent line then by adding more and more counts strands gets smoother in the bottom we got clumping this value is for clumping the root of the Strand and this one for clumping the tip the farther we get from number zero dip off the Strand and will be further from each other and closer to zero means steps gets close to each other it's the exact same thing for the roots but instead of tip Roots gets closer and further moving on to the next one by increasing the exponent it ignores the clumping from tip to root larger number meaning it gets closer to the root top right of the clumping we got random length this comes in handy when you don't want all the hair strands have the same length by decreasing the mean and Max you can shorten the hair randomly next we got hair thickness this one is the thickness of the root and the other one is the thickness of the tip you can easily increase the numbers to thicken up the root or tips in the bottom we got noise noise adds irregularities to the hair so it looks more natural at the end of it you can change the intensity of the noise then using this one you can change the starting position of this noise in the right we got curl obviously this comes in handy with curly hair using this one you can change the intensity of this curl and in the bottom you can change the scale of the curves meaning the amount of 12 in each hair strand also you can change the shape of the curl using this curve node after that we got roughness it's basically the same as noise but the effects only happening to the half of the hair strands resulting to more random and realistic hair overall since hair in real life is not perfectly soft unless you use some kind of product so this brings up the realism bit more let's not forget about the delete hair node this might sound useless but trust me it's not one way you can use it is to select the hair in the object mode Shifty to duplicate and escape to place it back using comb groom it to the outside then back in shading click on this icon to duplicate the geometry notes as well so we don't override our geometry node settings Now by increasing the probability you can choose how much of the hair you want to remove then at the end we got some hair sticking out which resolves to much more realistic hair in the next video we're gonna make this hair using the exact method subscribe if you want to see that and if you like the video give it a thumbs up to download the 3D files and real-time process of making these characters be sure to check out my gumroad and patreon Page I'll see you on the next one purse

Channel: PixelicaCG

Views: 33,530

Keywords: tutorial, blender, character hair tutorial, hairs, realistic hair, groom, character, how to create, how to create hair, blender tutorial, blender 3.4, geometry nodes, 3d character modeling, create, 3d, how to make hair, new hair system, free hair system, eyebrows, animating, stylized character, animation, 3d modeling, 3d art, art, 3d tutorial, artist, instruction, creating, cycles, cgi, rendering, how to, female, hairstyle, realistic, long hair, short hair, blender hair, blender hair tutorial

Id: XXwoc-4dfEk

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023