Maya XGen African Hair Tutorial

[Music] hi everyone my name is isaac golander and i'm a character artist this is my tutorial for realistic african hair in ex-gym while i was working on my latest project i found it really hard to find any resources on realistic african hair so i decided to make this tutorial i did find one tutorial on curly hair which i've based a lot of my work on and i've added a link below so that you can support that creator i've set this tutorial up in three parts we're going to look at setting up an extreme project and everything you need to make sure it doesn't crash or cause problems later on secondly we're going to look at making the actual groom and finally we're going to have a look on the material and some tweaks that i made just to make it feel more realistic so to start off when you have your model you want to start by making it a correct scale so first you're going to set your my project to centimeters and then you can measure the head to fit that measurement once you've done that you can go ahead and set your project so it's very important that you set your project before you start working next gen because if you don't exgen won't know where to look for the extent files on your computer one other important note is that you can't have any spaces in your naming convention whether it's files or folders that lead to your maya project because xgen can't read such files now you can get started the first thing we need to do is create a scalp like so a scalp is basically uh an extra geometry which covers the area where you want the hair to come from x-gen doesn't like it very much if you create it straight on a geometry that you skin to a rig so if you want to animate your character later then you need to make sure to use one of these sculpts furthermore the paint masks that we will be using later to make densities for the exgen only works on the geometry which uses elaborate material so the easiest way to make a scalp is simply by manually selecting all the faces that you want to remove like so the way i did it was by first creating a symmetry so to do that you just have to hold in control and shift and right click symmetry and topology then you select the edge loop in the middle you do something like that and then simply delete i've already made my sculpt so we're going to start working from that instead so to start the xgen you just go to generate xgen editor and you want to create a new description uh if you don't already have a collection you name it something like like this a collection is a a folder under which all of your descriptions are gathered so once you've made a collection for a character you can make all of your grooms descriptions connected to that we're going to call this description just here like that the only option we have to change here is from using attributes to placing in the shaping guides using attributes is more for fur or peach fuzz or anything like that but we want to be able to control the flow of the hair because we're making a specific hairstyle the first thing i like to do is create a paint mask to drive the density uh you do that by creating a map here and we can call this and set the resolution to something like 25 and keep it at white we can go here to look at the tool then isolate your geometry like so the oxygen will grow from all the area that is white so what we want to do is just mask off the edges the easiest way to do this is by setting a symmetry here so you just go down to stroke and press reflection you can also change the size of the brush by holding b and left clicking add some asymmetry and some noise because as we know hair isn't uh a hairline isn't completely straight so something like this um i've already made a paint mask before so we're going to be using that but this gives you an idea of what you want to do so after we made a paint mask we can start adding some guides guides are basically geometry that decide the direction that the x-gem goes towards so we can do something like this we can scale it up and the tool you want to be using for shaping these guides is this one right here you can also change the shape of it by holding in b and left clicking like so all right so that looks good once i have this guide selected i can go to copy guides and that just saves a lot of time because i can paste it like this so i think they need to be a little bit bigger we can scale them at the same time like that make sure that your geometry is selected when you have the guides once you've added enough guides then [Music] a guide that you put between two existing ones will sort of average out between them so you see you already get this shape for free if you don't want to add the guides like one side at a time you can always select one side and then go to mirror guides and if i press that this will just be mirrored over the same on the other side so for this hairstyle i'm really trying to get that separation of that hairline drawn here something like this um after which you know you can go in and sort of clean it up a bit okay nice for this tutorial i'm going to use the guides that i made earlier as you can see i put in some more time to just get that natural flow in so now we can start working with the primitives and generating the hair first of all if you haven't done this then you need to make sure that you have at least two guides for the hair to start generating and we can set it to a density of 20 so that's something low just to get an idea of what it looks like and yeah this looks pretty good i really like how the hair is separating here it looks natural you can set the modifier cv count to 200 the reason we want it to be high is because this modifier dictates how many vertices you have on each strand of hair so because we're making a curly hair we need that number to be pretty high secondly we want the length to be one because we want the length to be the same length as the guides if you set it to anything higher then the values i'm going to give you later in the modifiers won't work as intended and the width of there is pretty small 0.01 worked for me while using this scale so if you have a realistic scale then this value should work for you as well and here you see the width ramp um the ramps that we're going to be using basically show what the hair is from its base to its tip this width ramp shows that the hair is thicker at the base and the further out we go the thinner it gets so once we're happy with that we can move over to the modifiers these are the modifiers i have from before but i'm gonna make them from scratch just so you see how to make them so the first modifier we need is clumping and when you make curly hair clumping is basically everything so you select it here and you will probably not have a clumping effect already um so don't worry if you don't see anything happening yet we can start off by setting the clump scale to something like this so basically the the hair clumps the closer you get to the to the skull then what we want to do is set up maps so these points here are basically like the guides and they dictate how many clumps of hair you have so if we set it something like five and generate this will be the point from which hair will be clumping i think that for my project i said it's something like one or maybe two because i wanted um quite big spacing between them so before we add the curling effect just make sure that the clump scale actually affects the full length of the strand like so for my project i set the curl value to be something random between 9 and 14. so here we want the curl effect to be lower at the beginning because that's when the hair is just coming out of the scalp but we want it to be very high at the end something like this it's pretty good and you can see the changes in value is reflected in how tight the curls are so we have some variation there secondly we want to go over to the offset effect and this basically dictates the radius of the curls so if we set it to something like 30 that's a bit too much yeah you can see what kind of effect it has um we want to have this quite low so a random number between 0.5 and 1.4 worked pretty nicely for me like that and then also we want to change the influence over the length of air so i want the offset to be higher the further away we get from there because the hair should loosen up and it should be at its tightest as it's close to the scalp i also have it quite tight at the end because i like this look of you can see the hair is forming into a tip which looks pretty nice in my opinion um after that we can go over to the noise effect in my opinion this is the most important one for getting realistic hair like this looks good but we're missing that random element of you know hair standing out freely so we get that here we want to set this value quite high something between 7 and 13 should do we want most of the offset to happen at the end of the girls obviously you can experiment with these values depending on what kind of reference you're using but i think this looks pretty good i also want to add that this hair is quite loose um it's somewhere in between a straight hair and an afro but if you want tighter curls all you have to do is increase these numbers to something crazy like between 20 and 30. and you can see we get a lot tighter curls and if you do that you know you obviously have to change the offset and the noise so it looks natural in that state it also won't increase your density like so so that you get more volume uh but we're going to stick to what i do best so we'll remove that okay yeah the clumping looks pretty alright so the next thing we can add is a cut and the cut will simply cut the hair randomly just to add some variation something between 0 and 10 is good so you get some variation after that we can add some noise the noise is really important to make the hair not look synthetic first noise i want to use a ramp like this because i want the hair to get noisier the further out it gets from the scalp as is the case with the real hair so usually you should be able to add a custom mask by clicking here and you want to add something like a pearly noise unfortunately maya 2020 has the bug where in the spot it doesn't work as that's the case for me so if you have that same problem you can do this little hack that i found uh load expression samples color and then pick one of these noises and you can play around with the numbers like set this to 1 yeah so something like that is good we'll add another noise this one um i have just to make a distinction between the hair that's just coming out of the scalp and the rest of the hair and we want to make that smooth and same thing here you can just add a noise then we could add the final noise this noise will just cover all the hair like a general noise all right so that's it for the modifiers um the hair still looks pretty in my opinion but remember we only have a density of 20. so now that the modifiers are done we can actually bump this up and get the results we want 200 is a pretty high number but i feel it works with african hair because it's usually quite dense and also you don't see through there it kind of breaks the realistic illusion all right so this is looking really good in my opinion and we have that natural flow up there and you really see how the noise and the clump modifier makes this hair believable by giving it all of these stray hairs fair warning you don't want to go back and edit modifiers while you have a density of 200 because that will likely crash your computer so make sure you set it to 20 before you do that make sure that you save your files all the time if you saved your file and you're worried about losing your progress you can always go to file and export your collection or description i would say export your entire collection and that means that even if you lose your groom you could always import it as long as you have the same sculpt geometry that we had right here just make sure not to rename anything if you rename something that will likely cause your file to be lost so that's it for the grooming and modifiers now i want to talk a little bit about materials because arnold has an ai standard here however it needs some modification before it looks realistic and especially for african hair you can use the ai standard ai standard hair uh it uses real values so this is what it looks like to assign a material to your hair you go to this folder that was created when you made a collection and you select the guides that you've been working on and you simply while having them selected go into your hypershade right click and assign to material in viewport all right so let's just take a look at what the standard material looks like in arnold so these are the results we got with the standard material and you know it's not bad but some of those values are not realistic for the hair we're trying to make furthermore i don't really like uh this reflection that we're getting it it looks a bit synthetic you know it's like too white and there is two black so we're going to change that this is the material that i made i change the lightness of the color of the hair with melanin as opposed to changing the base color and i also increase the randomize a little bit for higher fidelity the roughness is slightly higher as well this is just something that i've seen in references and then looking at my own hair which is similar to the one we're making now uh the most important is probably the shift here so hairs are have ridges on them and the angles of these ridges changes how it looks the default is three but african american hair has 2.3 in its angle so that's what what you want to have so these are things you can change straight away some looked at things so that was just changing the specular a little bit i had a little bit of like orange brown in there made it slightly darker and i made a second specular tint just slightly darker as well i feel like this adds a little bit more color to the hair and in my opinion it looks more realistic so you can let me know what you think about it in the comments these are the results i got from my material i think it's very subtle but you know it makes it just a little bit better anyways thanks for watching i can't wait to see what you guys make of this um personally i feel like one of the things that's been stopping me from making black characters is that i've been unsure how to approach the hair problem um but hopefully this will help a lot of you passed that blocker so you can create your characters freely thanks for me and thanks for watching if you liked my video and you want to see more feel free to like or subscribe and leave a comment below on anything else you'd like a tutorial on see you later [Music]

Channel: Isaac Olander

Views: 13,956

Rating: 4.9845958 out of 5

Keywords: Maya, xgen, afro, african, hair, cg, groom, realistic, hyperrealism, 3d, modeling, zbrush, vfx, character, sculpt, likeness, artstation, art, digital, blender, arnold, render, material, shader, skin, xyz, black, woman, tutorial, game dev, realtime, timelapse, movie

Id: f-7C2YPfd1w

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021