Maya Xgen Hair Cards for Game Character Tutorial

hey guys welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to be talking about the very important subject for our character and for any character our artist out there we're going to be talking about hair cards now haircuts are one of those like demons that character artists have to face all the time because they're tricky they're not easy to do they are very technical and they take a lot of time like you can take up to 20 hours to just comb your character and generate all the stuff that you need so I'm showing you here a couple of examples from just Google some are very good for instance of course on chargin it's excellent in hair cards some of them are not as good for instance this guy right here not the best one I'm gonna show you a method that for me works really really well and it's actually not that complicated to follow now there are infinite ways or not infinite but there are a lot of ways to do them some people paint the cards some people generate them with fiber mesh some people do other crazy stuff like use plugins and other softwares we're going to be using just Maya and exchange so these are the four steps that we're going to be following for the creation of our haircuts we're going to be using SP 16 to generate them to generate the hair and then we're gonna generate the maps out of that action information and then we're gonna place the cards into our character and finally work on the rendering we we did until this point because if you try to do this before your character is texture or before you're done with all the other steps it gets tricky to evaluate whether or not it looks good so it's better to just finish the textures as we did with our character and then just jump into your hackers okay so let's jump into action now if you've never used action before do not worry we're gonna make it very simple we're just gonna brush the surface of what this plugin is capable of and it's gonna be very very simple so I'm gonna start here with my with a big plane I'm gonna change the divisions to like 6 and 6 rotate 30 degrees now why are we rotating T 30 degrees because this 30 degrees are the closest we can get to this to the curvature of our head and it's it gets a very early gives a better result than just doing it with them we know no curvature here so we're going to start with just our base here and this is important we're going to be generating several variations of hair cards you can't just get a nice-lookin here with just one type of haircut you need actually to have several different types of haircuts actually I think if we google real quick like this is the kind of stuff we're going for we're gonna have different variations of the amount of hair and the form of the hair and this is what's gonna allow us to have a very realistic here now how many do we need that's actually a very easy question to answer we need these five types of variations we need our main hair card which is gonna be the broadest and most important character because it's gonna cover most of the initial hair then we're gonna need some big break ups which are gonna be close to what we have with our main her card and actually I have an example right here so let me show you the big hair card it's gonna be like this area right here oh let me draw right here so it's like a big haircut right here and then there's the big breakup it's gonna be something like this it's a big piece of hair that's gonna break up from having the same card for the big parts and then the small breakup will be like this little hairs right here okay and then the transitional here transition like here we're gonna find out on the borders of our hairs you're gonna have like here on the forehead on the back of the neck it's gonna be the hair that connects the big cards to the geometry of the face and it usually is a very small simple care I'm going to show you later on the the generation or the map that I generated for my character but for now let's just focus on on the ante action and finally flyaways which flyaways are gonna be these shares that are just like flying away that's their name implies and they are very useful because they break the silhouette of the hair so as you can see here it's gonna be a very complex stuff that we're gonna be working with I usually recommend to have one main card too big break ups too small break ups one-third sorry too transitional hairs and one or two flyaways depending on of how messy you want your hair to look for my character I think I just did one anyway let's go back into action we're gonna generate the main card right now so I'm just gonna scale this a little bit I'm gonna do the history for some informations and review it to make sure everything's clean now one of the most important things about extent is everything needs to be super clean in regards to your name you come no spaces no weird names no special symbols just as clean as possible so I'm just gonna call this hair card base Gio and then I'm gonna go here into x-gen open the extreme window I'm gonna create a new description selecting the geometry of course of course and the description is going to be called Freya hair description scree description there we go in the collection which is the name of the hair that we're gonna be creating it's gonna be big hair card collection we can even go and call it Freya big hair card collection just to make sure the only thing you need to change here is change placing and shaping guides instead of using attributes controlled by expressions we're doing it in a place and shape the guides and just going to say create and boom now my x-gene is active you can see it here on my outliner everything is properly connected and I just need to generate my hair so for this to work we need to add guides and to up guys we're just gonna go up here into this little symbol here with the plus sign and you only need three to start with if you want more guides you can have more guts it's gonna give you more control what's gonna be or take longer to to make sure everything looks nice now once the guides up they are there you can just press your little eye right here and boom you got hair what I'm gonna do now so I'm gonna select the the little guides here you can select them from here and just go into oh okay this is one of the problems that you sometimes have it's difficult to select having the geometry you can just hide it you don't need that anymore and just guide control points so like one and bring it up how long will the hair be well since we're gonna be taking a front or a right view front is usually the one I go but for some personally I rotated actually let's go cool thing about x-gen you can just rotate it 90 degrees let's go front view no let's go one Haiti or minus 90 there you go I'm just gonna select my Geo so like the hair the extreme menu again and just re annuli analyze and see that that guy is controlling where the hair is gonna stop and I can do a little bit of tricks here and there to give the guide a nice looking flowy profile flow in motion so if I want the hair to be like imagine I want to be very clumpy like falling close to the hair is nap or something I can just move this I should be able to that's weird okay so I'm just gonna move this points all the way up I think is the camera that's freaking out no it's not the camera that's really weird anyway I'm just gonna move the points up to give them a little bit of a flow it's not subselection let me reset my move tool maybe something's freaking out yeah weird anyway I'm just gonna update here and you can see now that I have all of these many strands coming up into my into my viewport this is where the fun begins now we get to control how we want our hair to look this is basically a hair card because if we go again to the front view we just bake this information into an image and we're gonna have very nice shadows but in very nice interaction however the issue is that this does not look like here now there are a couple things you can do here first of all I'm gonna go down here into the tube shade and turn it off so that I can more clearly see the color and the shape of the hair the tube shape is pretty much trying to - what's his name it's trying to give you the information there it's not it's not really helping me trying to make it look like here but it's not the best idea now controls here first of all density if I turn off or up the density or loaded or lower the density I'm gonna have more hair and less here usually I find that for this type of hair for it's fine it all depends on the scale you're seen as well but let's keep it this way for now now one thing you can do is you can paint a mask on your polygon to tell where you want your hair to appear this is very useful because right now you can see that it's a lot of hair and we don't want that we want pretty much just like like a strip of hair so it should be a lot less volume now it's gonna be very easy but it needs to be very specific so follow me along you're good you're gonna come here into the mask option click the little arrow and say create map now name it again you need to have a name that's easy to remember so main hair mask and we're gonna start the color with black and say create so now the whole thing it's black and wherever I paint my new color in this case white it's where the hair is gonna be so I'm just gonna double click this tool here change my color to white and just paint a little strip here those need to be perfect it's just to create the Strand or the the volume here now if you look at this you'll see that nothing is happening because you need to save if you don't say nothing happens now after I save here with a little square the hair will update and we're good to go we can continue working with my my hair so hit Q now I don't have anything else to do with my with my plane so I'm just gonna turn it off and there we go and we can start working with the hair itself what can we do again we can change the density which I think that was good enough maybe like a 6 because I want to have a little bit of a gap in between the hairs and now here on the bottom side the modifier CB count is how many points each hair has riding right now it's at 5 5 is good however for a couple of modifiers that will be going to be using later on at 10 is going to be way better so I'm just gonna change that to 10 you can see there that the curvature is a little bit smoother so that's good for us and then lengths you can change the length so make it bigger or make it lower in this case I'm just gonna leave it the one one other thing you can do you can change the width for the tests that I've been doing in the past several months usually a point twelve is good for for for a character if you go lower it's too thin and if you go higher it's way too thick so point 10.12 that usually especially for like human-scale that's usually good for us so I'm gonna leave at that point of this right here this is very important this is a ramp and ramp this ramp controls the width of the hair you can see now that since the ramp is pretty linear it starts and ends with pretty much the same width however the hair we don't want that we want the hair to start very then so it makes it easier to transition from that geometry into the hair and then I'll widen up keep its width and then at the end taper out like so you can see here this is the result the further out you are the thinner will look and the closer you are to the geometry that thinner will look as well so this is a very nice this is a very nice initial generation for our our hair right now if you need to you can also rebuild the guides to remember usually when they don't answer like crazy you should be able I think it's a snapping to something but I'm not sure what okay no it's not that weird I'm not really sure what it's snapping to but usually you can control the guides and if you move them along you can you can control pretty much how you want it your curl for instance if I do that and I update here's our gonna try to go all the way to this place right there if I move them back there we go so depending how you want your hair to look you can move the guides and if you want more points for your guides you just need to rebuild them here with more points anyway so that's it for the basics of the of the placement of the guides as you can see very easy not a big deal now let's go into the fun stuff over here on the modifier option you're going to be able to add modifiers to your hair and the modifiers that you can add our planning you just hit this button here and there's all of this here's or this modifiers again we're just brushing the surface so we're gonna use let's start with like a noise modifier I'm gonna hit okay and what this does it adds a noise modifier to the whole here with these values right here so the mask is how much it's affecting if I have the mask at 1 then the noise is effect affecting the whole thing - the noise is how intense I want the noise to be if I do it like 10 boom there's a lot of noise and now my hair looks very very messy frequency is how frequent the know is if I increase the frequency and the magnitude you're gonna see a very very messy hair now remember this has to do or this place directly with the amount of CP count you have for your curve the more C becomes you have the nicer it will look so make sure to place it at least a 10 or 12 that's usually a good number now this is important this is how the noise affects the hair going from the root to the tip and this curve right here tells me that the noise is going to be more prominent on the tip if I want the noise to be everywhere I can just move this up and then all the hair is gonna be messy which usually doesn't happen usually the hair gets Messier as it gets closer to them to the end right here so as you can see here very messy hair now if I don't want it to be that messy but I like the way it looks I can lower the mask if I go to 0.5 it's like the intensity of the element now this happens often and what's happening here is that it kind of struggles to update and you just need to click this thing sometimes you need to keep moving the values until it appears again or just click render and it should give you a nice preview now talking about render we're gonna be talking about that in more depth in the next video but I want to give you a quick show here I'm gonna we're gonna be using Arnold render so I'm gonna go into Windows settings and preferences plugin manager and we're gonna use Arnold now personally I like using render man that's my go to render but Arnold is included with every Maya and I didn't want to make this more complicated than it already is so that's why we're gonna be working with with Arnold what I'm gonna do now is Arnold is gonna be loaded so let's load Arnold there we go and I'm just gonna create like I'm gonna go into the front view turn on this thing select my description right click assign new material I'm gonna go into Arnold and Alan has a standard hair material which is actually really good you go into standard hair it even has presets so you can do like let's say replace and there we go and the only thing we're gonna be missing is from the rendering or from Arnold what's it called from the Arnold tools here or you can create a light let's do like an area light and we're going to place the area light right here pointing so like a 45 degree angle so that the light is as evenly distributed as possible we don't want the hair to have weird shadings that's optics Porsche like to for let's get the front view again and hit render now if everything goes to extreme no collection name given let me see if it's rendering real quick options well let's go into display alpha channel nope we got nothing so something's wrong here oh I know what it is you need to save the scene I always save the scene if you do not save the scene then a something something doesn't work so let's do this here test and two there we go continue now that the scene is safe now we should have the render so there we go we're not seeing anything because we need more light but the the objects are there so let me up this to like sixteen if I remember properly the lights in Arnold tend to be quite low in intensity so let's call all channels and there we go there's our hair we're gonna be lighting this in in a better way but as you can see here this is all we need to get our hair going okay so I'm gonna stop the video right here guys and in the next video we're going to talk about what things we need to do to our haircuts to one make them look better and to get the maps out of it okay so hang on tight and I'll see you back in the next video bye bye hey guys welcome back to the next part of our series today we're gonna be exploring the second part of the generation of our Maps if you remember back here on the on the Photoshop file that we have the important thing that we need to follow or the processor we're going to follow is the action generation the map generation the car placement and then the rendering today we're going to be focusing on the map generation now if you remember we have our hair right here for for our little haircut that we're creating and I added a couple of extra things here I'm gonna show you real quick I went back into the modifiers well first I went back here into the preview output and it's very important for you to tell action what kind of renderer you're using usually the most common ones which are are no beret and render man you should be good to go to just select it and you're good it shouldn't be an issue but for others you might need to go a little bit into scripting to make sure that everything is reading properly now going into modifiers I added this coil one the coil one let me let me get rid of them so it's easier to explain so we have we have the we had the noise first which just gave us a little bit of variation and I can add one more modifier which is the coil coil will give us a wavy hair we can multiply the amount of waves we want for instance let's go into file and with this button with the mask we can tell how strong we want the effect to pretty much will affect our hair and there we go we got a very nice wavy hair for our character now I'm gonna go into my material editor right now I'm gonna go into my hyper shade I'm gonna go into the AI standard shader and if you remember we're using the standard hair and we use the preset which is the what's it called the red element now unfortunately for us the red will make our lives a little bit more difficult when we generate the mask and let's talk about that real quick the maps that we want to generate are the following we want to create a color map specular map normal map ambient occlusion map Direction map and opacity map this six max maps together will give us a very nice looking hair once we hit marmoset now from this six maps the two that are going to be generated by us are going to be the art the color one and the opacity one normal habit and direction are going to be made with a little plugin little trick then I'm going to show you in shortly and the specular map we're just gonna make it in Photoshop so let's start with the color map the color map captures the color of our hair and usually let me let me show you real quick if we were to grab let's again a new ordinal shader hair shader where is it or no standard share a standard hit let's call this base hair material and let's say that we want the base color of the hair to be red okay so that's it if we plug this in into the description remember you always select the description and add the stuff in and we render one of the things that you're gonna notice is that we don't have the color why is this happening well because the way the hair works is actually very complicated it's not as easy as just a normal shader the way hair works is that you have several things playing with each other to give you the result of the color so for instance right now even though we have a base color of red the roughness the specular the tint here the specular tint it's pretty much changing how we look or how we appreciate the hair now again unfortunately for us if I just grab this like let's say a red here and say replace and we just create this nice red hair for our character it would look nice on the Beauty render on this like image right here it that that's good for us however this won't work in the end game because we have a light information like the the race of my of my area light are giving us information if I were to save this as a color map then some parts of the hair would be white and some would be black and we don't want that we want like a fool or a complete color for our character now why am I saying that this is unfortunate for us in regards to Arnold that's because usually we would go here into the a Ovie's we would just select the video map move it into the a Ovie's and if we use the Arnaud render view and we render technically it should allow us to select the albedo and use the color however since the color is white and what we're seeing is actually the reflections in other post-processing that Arnold does it won't allow us to have the nice colors that we have now how can we get around this well very easy by using our HDR's so if you don't know about this bit the this page it's called HDR heaven and it's great I'm gonna go into studio and I want to grab a very soft studio light because I don't want any sort of contamination going into my hair I want this to be as clean as possible and I don't like this guy I'm gonna grab the chook a map and you just need to move this guy let me wait for this - there we go showing carpet you can control X and going to my projects projects source images and just drop it there I'm gonna go here into into Arnold let's get rid of this guy or at least hide it for now Arnold lights let's call this a sky dome light and in the sky dome and it's attribute a turn I'm gonna select color I'm gonna change this to a file and the file of course is gonna be if my project is set which it should that's not let me go back you can just point straight to it there you go source images there we go small studio boom so we're in the small studio I'm gonna rotate this so that the lights are like on the on the back here like so there we go front view that should be good and I'm gonna render so what this is gonna do since we have a 360 light now we will have of course a little bit of a specular information but it shouldn't be that bad for us it should give us a nice looking color information here for the hairs which is exactly what we're looking for don't worry about that theater right now let me let me cancel this I'm gonna go into the arno render view which I think it's a little bit faster the only issue about using an HDR is that it takes a little bit longer to get the proper colors out of your hair but as you can see here we're gonna have a very nice-looking texture once everything is clean up in this image so I'm gonna stop the render right here just in your case let it flow keep it going until it hits a nice little color and even though we'll we'll have a couple of specular highlights here and there it's it's okay it shouldn't be that bad and I'm gonna just stop this here and what are you gonna do is you're gonna come here and you're gonna save image and you're gonna save the image right on your project so there we go here let's go into images I'm gonna say this s color safe so we go back to our plot toward project go into images that's all that's our color though of course again this is not clean we would need the to wait for the render to finish but this is exactly what we're looking for okay now for the occlusion you could just jump into the Alpha Channel like this oh yeah we need to grab our image our sky dome light and in the camera visibility turn it to zero and now if we rear ender let me cancel that let's grab the Cardinal render view start there we go now we have an alpha see that oh that guy right there so we just get the Alpha here we can stop this again wait until the render finishes so did you get a cleaner alpha and file save image save s alpha go check our image Hey did I save it in the wrong place oh yeah I did so again oh sorry for this if everything is set up properly I shouldn't be needing to jump around so much but let's keep it that way oh it's saving it okay that's fine in this case just save it as a multi-layer EXR same place real quick so let's call this diffuse and now the multi-layer EXR if you open in ZBrush you can select this option if you don't if you can't open just download this plug-in is called EXR IO or IO it's free open and boom we got color information right there of course not clean yet and alpha information so that's two of our maps ready for us the next three maps will come thanks to the courtesy for great artists that shared these ones with us through the marmoset page actually and we're just gonna import his artist name is where is it Shuma so just import this file I'll plug his his information in the info info for you as well guys and what you're gonna see is that you're gonna get three new materials here let me clear this for us and grab this three guys it's very simple notes it's actually like completely easy to to redo if you can't find the links this is what it is using a sampler info and what the sampler info is doing it's it's extracting the information from the normal camera importing it into the value of a range note and then exporting it as a color of a flat Arnold material same thing for the Direction information is just information from the sampler info going through a range node and then into a flat color from Arnold and finally the AOP so what are you gonna do it's very simple just grab your description select your hair assign for instance the AO the description size six in material here no g name matches in steering outstanding give it one second let's try the other ones first let's try the normal I think it were missing a shading group that's fine direction okay there we go direction so if I render what I should get it's this weird-looking map now you might think what does this do this is pretty much gonna tell marmoset how to transport the the the specular throughout the hair so that instead of having a flat specular just reflecting it will travel along the surface of the hair it's a very useful map to give a very realistic look to the hair so this one you just file save image and save it as your direction map and then same stuff I'm just gonna going here assign new existing material Direction map not sorry a normal map there we go render and boom it's your camera are facing normal so this is gonna give you a little bit of a bump and as you can see this is the magic of doing your using action instead of painting the hairs by hand this allows us to have all of this interaction in between the hairs so it will look like some hairs are on top of each other and that's what actually gives volume to our overall hair at the end so that's normal and we're just missing the ambient occlusion one and I think the issue is that I don't have any thing connected here as you can see we get an out color so we pretty much just need an a I AI flat which is the just a flat material we just connect this into the color we select the description assign the new AI flat there we go and if we render we should have ambient occlusion ready to go look at that beautiful thing this guy's this map right here this is the most important map of all because this map will give us a very nice looking depth to the hair this is what's gonna drop the shadows in between the little strands even though it's a flat plane so by having this information right here this is gold for us because this again is what's gonna make our hair be as realistic as possible now you might notice that even though this is looking nice we get a little bit of idealizing here on the back that's very common and one way to avoid that is by having a plane on the back it displays this a 90 degree so that it's completely flat so on the back of the hair so that they do not intersect and I'm just gonna give this guy a new material again an ordinal shader flat and I'm gonna use a middle gray this is gonna be cut out with the with the opacity map with you would be with that specific map what's gonna help me it's instead of having the black background and having a weird-looking anti-icing on the border of the hair we actually have something to bounce off and that gives us a nicer cleaner line so it's just a way to avoid having those disruptions again I'm gonna just come back here that's I can just save this image for a second so that you can see all of three all three images together assigning sixteen material let's go back to Direction map render I'm going to do the the gray background for all of them so that we don't get weird in theorizing happening here in our hairs there we go it's a nicer one save and finally we're just gonna use the normal map boom and here we go so super handy tool thanks to the marmoset team for forgiving this to us because it's really really good it makes this process a whole lot easier and that means that the only two maps that we need to worry about in regards to Arnold or any other render it's the diffuse and the opacity and most of the times the diffusion the opacity come in the same place so you're too cold in there that's why I like to use renderman because renderman has better hair shaders I believe so that's her that so if you don't like doing diffuse and lighting with any other stuff just do these three maps with our gnome which again comes with Maya and do the other two maps with your renderer of your preferred renderer finally the last map that we would need to create comes right here it's actually very easy I'm gonna feel a layer the specular map I'm gonna feel in there black I'm gonna say image or sorry filter noise add noise that's good just general noise and then filter blur motion blur and I'm gonna go 90 degrees stay straight down let's say okay and that's it you can extend this a little bit so that you don't get those weird looking lines there and if you want you can blur this a little bit so filter blur Gaussian blur just a little bit like let's say one pixel is good so one pixel and that's it this is our specular map so this will give us the straight lines that are gonna play with the straightness our fur here it's just to break up the specular so not you don't have like a perfect specular going all around if you want to you can just keep it and you won't need any specular map you just control loop with sliders in marmoset or anything in your favorite gaming engine anyway guys this is at the end of this video and with that with this finished we already have the six maps that we need we already got the color map from our lightning scenario we got our specular map normal I'm gonna push on direction and opacity so with what we have everything ready in the next couple of videos regarding the hair cards we're gonna go back into our fully textured character and we're gonna start placing the cards now it's gonna be a long process I'm gonna make it brief for you to understand but it will mean that you will have to go back and work a little bit with that so be patient we're almost done with this whole process after this it's just setting everything up in marmoset and we'll be good to go to have our final presentation for our character so keep on going guys I know you're doing well if you need any help you know feel free to ask and if nothing if you don't need anything anything at the moment then I'll see you back in the next video bye bye

Channel: Victory3D

Views: 48,037

Keywords: maya xgen hair cards, maya xgen hair tutorial, maya xgen game character, xgen hair cards game character, game character hair cards, alpha cards xgen hair, hair plane game character, polygon hair game character, game character hair creation, hair for games, hair creation for games, real-time hair character, real time hair character, hair alpha cards, xgen hair cards tutorial

Id: tiuNm7ZD9qw

Length: 33min 39sec (2019 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019