Playing with the New Hair System in Blender

okay this is a little video on um just me messing around with the new blender hair system which is really really cool um and how how to go about starting it up okay first you need blender um download the experimental um blender 3.2.0 alpha and when you get that open it up okay here we go and we want to enable the stuff we want which is if you go to interface developer extras make sure that's ticked experimental new curve types that's what we're working on i'm going to delete the cube and i'm going to make a susan so we can put hair on susan i'm going to give her some subdivisions just apply those um raise her up out of the floor and now uh it is time for this new curve type oh my goodness i'm gonna grab an empty hair and um looks like it already chose susan as the surface so i can just go and do sculpting oh my goodness my dogs are running around okay i'm back after a brief interruption um we are in sculpt mode on the new hair curves um object here and we need to add some curves and i want to add pretty long hair let me say five meters and i'm gonna add a lot of curves at a time just because that's that that's a hundred sure whatever um use front face um yeah i never took that on before so i guess we'll see what it does and then you know just start just start blasting it's very exciting um okay i think we have enough hair uh so we have this and now we can comb it with this cone tool up here you can press f2 resize your cursor here and i'm going to select projected just so it'll like grab everything through um because i just want to kind of get it into one big long um shape and you can kind of see that we've got some like really hard kinks in the hair and what you can do is go into your eevee settings and we want it enable or actually we want to just set the curve subdivisions to be three and then we have a bit of a higher yeah subdiv smoother curves um yeah and so this is a lot of fun but i kind of like to have a material on here so i can see what it's going to look like um so i'll just shape a little bit more and you can kind of drag the brush around shape as you like and um you can also if i was like ooh this hair is too long this is a shrink or grow brush oh no this is add curves this one with the arrows um i can kind of chop it or sell it the plus and add more um which is pretty cool and um yeah so you have a couple other tools here maybe there'll be more in the future like this one's delete curve so you know pretty pretty self-explanatory um this snake hook is kind of like the one in the sculpting where you could just grab some and like extend a whole bunch of geometry um so that could be useful but i'm just gonna leave it at this for now i'm gonna make a quick material i'm not gonna do anything crazy okay what we want to use is curve info and that'll give us a fair bit to work with um i'm just going to set up three color ramps i'm copying this why don't you there we go because one is going to be the um gradient from the top to the bottom of the head to determine the hair color and i'm going to set that by grabbing intercept from the curve info which is just information from the root to the tip of the curve and then i can use this to make you know some pretty blue hair that's looking pretty cool uh and i kind of want maybe a little bit of something i like about this is that you could just like sculpt in this viewport as well while you're working on the material it's very fun um okay i also want a little bit of actually i don't want this color ramp i want a mix rgb note because i want a little bit of like randomness for the hair strands um i just want some lighter and some darker so i'm going to put the random which is just random curves into the factor so some of them are white and some of them are black so you can see what that looks like here um and i'll just add this color ramp to this one and then set it to soft light it's just a soft blend it's actually too harsh and lower it a bit there cool and now i'm going to grab intercept and put into this color ramp and i'm going to set that to the alpha but in order to get the alpha to work because what i'm doing is i don't like this hard cut off i want this to fade and i also want it to fade a little bit at the roots so what i'm gonna do is go into the material properties put this to alpha hashed uh and you can see now these roots are transparent but what we want is we only want those to be a little bit transparent so the black values are transparent the white values are opaque and i'm just going to drag another little guy here so we have black values at the bottom as well we can kind of you know drag those up as long as we want them to be just gonna crunch that a little tiny bit more cool um so that's looking pretty cute uh what i want to also do i think is set up some nicer lights really quickly i'm gonna i'm gonna get out of sculpt mode and i'm just going to grab the light that i have in here maybe soften it a little bit i'm going to add another light area also gonna uh turn on contact shadows on these lights okay cool and i'm gonna also make my scene background something nice so it's just nicer to look at okay i don't want to fiddle around with lights forever i kind of just wanted to get something that could help me understand how the strands are looking and how the reflection is looking and all that so back to shading click on hair curves so what i want to make is the strands a little bit softer and also a little shinier so i'm gonna turn up the subsurface um point one might be too strong but i'm actually bring this down and make it a blue color and i'm also gonna do the radius so radius is rgb um and i don't want that much red then i want more blue because i have blue hair here um so i'm just bring that to one yeah that's a nice that's too much i'm not gonna fiddle around with this too too much i am going to turn up the roughness and also make it a little metallic just because that looks pretty oh it's a little bit too intense turn up the specular tint too you want like a really cool sheen i'll just turn it down for now anyway you can just kind of go in and mess around with these settings as you like until you get something decent and this is fine for now um there's also like fancy hair shaders and stuff in in blender like the principal bsdf but it was acting a little bit funny for me and um so i'll just stick with this one for now and then we can yeah come back in here and this is sort of like a basic setup for our hair it's looking really nice um but if you happen to like want like a piece that is it's really hard to like if i wanted like a strand to come out in front or a lock of hair to come out in front it's kind of hard to do that when it's all you know jumbled together like this um so you can just you can just add more and i'll do that by going object mode at empty hair hair curves a1 select susan grab that material that i made this is hair i'll just name it and then go into sculpt mode and say i wanted to strand over here i'm adding so much geometry um i'm going overboard with this um but that's okay amazed at how well blender's just like totally fine with me doing this it's awesome um but yeah so now i have this other strand it's kind of off in its own little layer and i can sculpt it as i like didn't get that shape quite right you could also set different materials for these so if i wanted her to have pink bangs oh i want this hair sweep to come in front of her face amazing uh amazing bring that back sphere to just you know drag the top bits not drag everything yeah that's uh that's basically how it works it's pretty incredible um you can also if i'm like oh i want another bang here i don't want to have to go through all that uh you can just duplicate it um so care curve here shift d right click and then oh right click again mirror global so i don't actually want this mirrored because this is weird um but now i can go into that one that i just added and sculpt it yeah there we go look at this beautiful hairstyle um all right the other thing you can do which is pretty cool is uh i'm gonna turn i'm gonna get out of sculpt mode and i'm just gonna grab my i'm gonna hide these two bangs and i'm gonna add geometry nodes to this first hair curve so i'm gonna select new then i'm gonna go into the geometry nodes tab up here all right and now i'm going to add like a noise texture that will determine how like wavy or kinky the hair is um so i'm going to oop didn't want to do that i made it wide you know okay fine it's wide now that's fine um so what we want to do is how this works is all of these all the hairs here are just like curves or splines or whatever and they all have like little points on them and you can set the position of the whole spline or the individual points and 3d space like position in 3d spaces is um determined like by rgb values so you can actually add um noise textures so anything that has rgb values can can manipulate objects in 3d space or vertices or points or whatever um there we go so in order to do that we need a position node and i'm just going to do this really fast if there is interest in like um how all this works there's tons of youtube videos on it and also i'm not a tech artist i would explain it poorly but um what we're basically doing is we're taking the position and we are adding um this like we're putting this through like the noise texture and then we are um adding that again so i don't want you just gonna grab this guy again and we want the color in here and we want to set this to offset so you can see this did a thing um the rgb values in this noise texture are offsetting all of the points here unfortunately that means the whole hair is leaving the surface so a quick way to fix that is to just set these two not now you have this and now you have some wave into the hair so um if we set the noise scale to zero the wave leaves and we set it up it comes back so you can set this up pretty high and see you know what comes of it and you can also add detail add roughness um but we're a little bit limited um just because we're limited by how many points are in these curves um so we're not really getting like a lot of big clumping or anything um so i believe what you can do is just re-sample the curve and this also makes it so i have to set the material again that's fine there we go all right so i set this down to like 10. my phone's going off oh my sushi's here yay okay so um with this set to one no we have nothing with this set to five you can kind of see like it we don't have as much like going on in the curves the the curves don't have many points to um do anything with so the higher we set this the crazier things get um which is really fun so it's really sort of like interesting to just play around with the values here and see what you can get that looks cool and then also come down to the noise and like scale that and see what looks good there because like the the different sort of looks you can get with you know different settings um are pretty bonkers yeah that's how that works um in principle um i'm excited for people who actually know how to like make hair to use these tools because i have no idea what i'm doing and i'm able to do stuff that looks relatively cool which is great um it's very easy um and say i wanted to get this uh hair sort of geometry node uh waviness onto these front strands like you can just add geometry nodes and click on the one that you just made and then it'll add them um and if you determine that oh it's too strong for the front strands you can just sort of make this a single user um and go back into geometry nodes and sort of reduce the intensity somewhat you know whatever looks good whatever you're going for there and if you don't like it you can just remove it amazing okay that's how uh that's how that works it's super fun

Channel: Katie De Sousa

Views: 80,845

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Id: TmBxCK9Kpvc

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022