Understanding The Hair Particle System (Blender 2.93)

hey welcome to my channel today we're actually going to discuss blender hair particle systems and and all the little nuances that go into a hair system and how you can create virtually any hair system that you can imagine so let's start right here at the top when you make a brand new particle system and you switch it over to hair you're first presented with this admission tab and the submission tab is the basic information it is saying hey i need to know some stuff from you what number of particles do we have to begin with and these are your actual particles not your children so you have to make sure you understand that if you have a thousand follicles of hair blender is going to calculate 1000 pieces of hair you can change the seed and that will just change the distribution ever so slightly but keeping the same inputs you used just to get a different result this is just random seed hair length this is exactly what it seems to be this is how long is the hair in this case our hair is four meters tall and the segments is how much each one of these particles is divided by now something to keep in mind this number doesn't change with how long your hair is so if i have a hair length of four it's still going to divide this hair length for bending purposes right as you either sculpt it or use hair dynamics it's going to maneuver this hair with only basically think of this like subdivisions right with only five levels of detail source this just tells you uh hey where is where is everything mapped right currently it's mapped to the faces but you can also change to map to the vertices and now you see all of my hair is coming out of each vertex uh one thing you'll notice though it looks like there's only eight here it's actually not true uh there is one thousand still don't get it twisted right but there is 1 000 but there's just multiples overlapping each one i like to keep it to faces but you know there might be a reason why you want to use vertices generally i i click this use modifier stack button what this button does is it just refers to the object's modifier properties and says hey look above it and just see what's up there make sure you're taking all that information into account when you're doing your calculations that's that's mostly what you need to know from the admission tab we'll close that up so that's again the mission your default properties if i drop down here dynamics here it's disabled but hair dynamics does what it says it says all right if i hit play on this system we're going to start calculating this hair so i hit play if i check that and i hit play the hair will account for gravity and wind and all these other things that are in dynamics render tab and viewport display tab these both are pretty much the same thing except one is saying it just says hey what does my hair system look like in the viewport and what does it look like in the render um you see this kind of thing a lot in blender this is similar to when you have a subdivision surface modifier on and you have how many levels in the viewport and how many levels in the render right i can set these strand steps here in the viewport to be two or it goes up to seven to max out likewise in the render tab you can choose you know how detailed is your path when you render it out um and also what material is your hair okay so let's talk about children here for a second oh that that sounded like a very serious conversation darling i think it's time we talk about the children okay no i'm just kidding um i never think about simple here like i just always skip this over because and i i'm probably wrong about this someone probably definitely knows more about about this than i do and there's a reason to use simple i'm sure it's still here i like using interpolated because i think it gives me a more realistic result and i have all these options here that you know you still get with simple but i uh i like interpolated display mount and render amount um this is saying how many do i want to see here in the viewport for playback purposes right i don't need to have 100 particles of hair in the display amount um because sometimes that might just bow down my scene and 10 might be enough to get by and by the way this is how many children per follicle of hair you have this is a basic equation right to know how many hair follicles you're going to have it's really just this is how many original hair particles you have you have a thousand in the number and each one of those is going to have children right and how many children right here you're going to display 10 children so in the viewport right now we're looking at ten times a thousand which is ten thousand children right here um but when you render you're going to have a hundred which would be a hundred thousand children um length this allows you to just sort of tone down the length a little bit i don't usually touch this because generally speaking um i like to just if my hair is shorter well then i like to actually sculpt my hair shorter but um this is helpful because this is keyframable so say you have a hair shrinking simulation um you can actually just keyframe this you know you can keyframe the length to have it go from one to zero and that way your hair actually grows or grows or shrinks over time so down here is where you're really getting into them into the meat and potatoes so to speak of your children right parting the clumping the roughness and the kink tabs these are really how your hair reacts or how they interact and what it looks like and this is how you can really start to define the shape of your hair so you want to have long flowing hair that's going to be different settings in the roughness tab and in the kink tab then if you want to make um a frizzy afro moving on that was a base level explanation of children but that's going to be one of the most important tabs keep that in mind hair shape this is a very important tab and you probably need to only need to touch it once um right in the beginning this is basically this is hey how thick is my hair and how thick is it at the base of my hair versus the tip of the hair the strand shape basically says okay what's you know what's the interpolation you can think of it like interpolation right so zero is linear so hair is not infinitely thin think you have to render it at some point so it has to be in the 3d world which means it needs actual depth right to render anything it needs depth so we can get lighting on the hair this tab is all about that um currently we have a diameter root of one and a tip of zero which means we're looking at a cone right so your hair on some level is basically a triangle if i were to increase this tip when i would render it say it would say be one then you actually have a cube right something that has depth at the top as well really just get creative with the shape of the actual follicle which brings me to this point strand shape this is saying interpolation right if it's a zero well then we have what this is over here it's just straight a straight line but you know you can change the shape to something like one and suddenly it's not a straight line anymore but it becomes more like bullet shaped right it takes more of a parabolic approach to going to the end or if it's at negative one you start to get a shape more like this so there's really these ways to craft the shape of your hair follicle and that's exactly what this is hair shape field weights okay this basically just says how does how does your hair interact with any sort of field weight or force field you throw in the scene if there's force look at this it's interacting with it whoa and you don't need hair dynamics turned on to interact with that keep that in mind um and you can turn that down say yeah i don't want to interact with forces right and then maybe there's also a vortex in the scene whatever that looks like and there's also a um there's a a harmonic in the scene harmonics do cool things too but you have all these crazy force fields in the scene and you have to you don't want to interact with anything or you do you know you can go through and change these so oh there was a force field i think i'll turn that off and then there was a vortex i think i'll turn that off there's so many field weights to worry about i think you know say you don't want to deal with any of those that's why you have this handy little old slider that says eh turn them all off right i don't want to think about any force fields or gravity or anything just turn them all off all right force field settings generally speaking on a beginner level you don't have to deal with these these basically deal with how does your hair interact with the force fields and you can do fall offs i don't fully know how this works i generally stay out of the force field settings tab this is advanced hair particle systems it's not really in the scope of this tutorial vertex groups all right let's drop this down vertex groups are very helpful because they allow you to map out where you want your hair to be if you have a high poly mesh so here in edit mode let me just add some more details in subdivide subdivide all right if i add a new vertex group and i'm going to call a group because i am lazy i will just grab the top here and i'll assign it all with a value a weight of one it's important keep that in mind vertex groups you you uh assign weight to them nothing's happened yet because i didn't apply anything obviously if i go into density and i can change this group right there it is saying all the density which is basically saying how much where do i put all this hair um goes one hundred percent to those and zero percent to everything else and we can skip the rest for now because textures i never use that's another advanced one generally speaking you won't you also won't need to create any custom properties for the hair so that's the base level of what all these do so i'm going to load up a brand new blender file right now okay here i am in a brand new scene and i'm going to add let's delete the default cube and let's add something fun let's add an icosphere because we're fun okay um i will add a new particle system and call it hair and for the sake of this portion of the tutorial we're going to do one one follicle of hair and the reason being i want to go through the settings on one follicle of hair in a little more detail so we can see exactly what these settings are doing to one follicle of hair so that way you know what they're doing to 10 or 20 or 100 or a thousand so that way you know what's happening to the children specifically speaking on each and end of each and every follicle of hair so right now we have one follicle of hair let's get a little more in depth right you can change from object mode to particle edit and you can just start using these tools up here to move things around and smooth them out and add hair and change the length and all that but the first thing you'll notice is uh man this is a very high detail at all right so okay let's just do what we started with i'm going to delete my edit so i can change these settings and we'll give it more so we'll get more segments right that makes sense i want to have more resolution so let's do 12. i like using 12 for whatever reason and i go back in here and i start doing it and um i quickly notice well i didn't do anything i don't have any more hair well okay when you're editing the particles you also have to change the display for the particle edit it's crazy but there's the options up here click there and then change the past steps from two just start increasing this number and then suddenly you'll be getting more detail and this makes sense because of course you want to limit how much detail you have while you're sculpting so that way um you can have real-time playback so now i can sculpt this hair and look at this i have uh i have more i have more resolution and i've got the sculpt that i like i'll go back into object mode and suddenly my hair went back to normal well don't fret because again there's another place that this that this exists we have to just keep this in mind it just exists in multiple places and it's down here in our viewport display we'll drop this down and again we have strand steps we can just increase this number here so now in our viewport display we have maximum steps all right perfect so we we now increased our strand steps in the viewport and we increased it in the particle edit mode so when we're editing the particles you can see it there we have that set up um let's just jump right in to children okay so like i said i like to use the interpolated one so i click here and we now have all of these hair follicles all over the object and they all are doing the same thing but they're in different places and that that's what children are here basically you just have duplicates of of your strand of hair and you can procedurally change the way they look but not the way they move because what the importance of children is that we're still doing one calculation right even if i had 250 children here if i turn on hair dynamics and i hit play we're getting like a real-time playback we're not dropping any frames um and that's because we're doing one calculation these all move in the exact same way and that's that's the power of children is basically giving giving a lot more detail and pretty much just duplicating one particle and referencing it all over your object and calling them children i want to keep my display amount down i'll keep it at 50 for now um parting i don't really mess with parting ever i don't really need it so i just skip it the important ones are these three clumping roughness and kink we'll start from the top clumping clumping basically just says hey do you want all the hair to clump together at some point and this is saying zero it doesn't clump at all and positive one clumps at the tip of the hair and negative one clumps at the base it's very simple that's what clumping does on one follicle of hair this shape controls how it clumps similar to how the hair shape controlled the shape of the hair you have the same thing um you can make the the clump more parabolic so it sort of does does a it goes into it or you can make it outward where it sort of curls into it right so if you want to make a custom clump you can just check this clump curve and right now it's not doing anything because it's set for it's at the very top where it's not clumping at all and this one's at the very top it's also not clumping at all so if you drag one down to the bottom you're going to get a clump at the bottom and you will get nothing at the top you can clump at the top and the bottom by just dragging these both down and suddenly they're connected at both the top and the bottom and you have one strand and you can pull it out in the middle and now you have sort of like a jump rope i mean you can really customize this curve to just make the wildest clump um if you go into roughness this is a nice one to use uh if you turn up random it slightly it slightly changes the shape of each hair um just slightly and that's super helpful for doing characters or or just doing any hair because you don't want the hair to look too uniform and right now they look very uniform i would say you always want some level of random and even if they're supposed to look very clean and straight honestly always give it a little bit like that much right .07 or something just that much is enough to do to do something because watch if i if i clump all my hair it looks like it's uniform but it's actually not you know that's perfectly uniform and it's just it doesn't i mean you know you can do what you want to do but i like doing a little bit of random on some level because it just gives it more detail take this size and make it much smaller and it's kind of like giving all this this giving a lot of a lot of little noisy detail to the hair and it's really cool because it just gives it this this wild look to it turn my clumping up a little bit and yeah just so we can see what this is doing so if i hit play we're just looking through our hair very cool this is what one strand of hair is doing let's jump down here into the kink and the kink does basically um basically controls how does hair move right like is your hair spirally is it braided is it wavy is it radial is it curly generally speaking i like to use curl and wave because i because i just like the way they move if i click curl you can you can increase the amplitude and then increase the frequency and you get your hair to start to curl it's helpful if you look at it from frame zero and if you turn down the amplitude you know you can just control have a little more control over the curl of it so let me just turn off these children for now one i will also delete my edit just so you can see okay so i have this one hair strand and there's no there's no sculpt on it if i turn the amplitube to zero on the curl we can see we have again a straight line um and the clumping actually affects the curl as well so if i put clumping at zero it's going to curl in a perfectly uniform way the whole way up and amplitude and frequency matter think about this just like just like a math signal right you know like a sine wave um what's my amplitude it's how much is it is it going out right you don't want that much what's the frequency doing like what's how often is it does it curl you know these are parameters you can change and the same thing goes for wave if i select wave um this pretty much just does a 2d sine wave not so much a curl but just a going out and you again you can change the frequency and the amplitude but i guess the point is what that with just one strand of hair with one follicle of hair um you're getting all of these unique hair strands that come out that you can use this noise here to make it look a little different throughout and you very quickly have something that looks like a bunch of different pieces of hair but really it's just the same hair okay so i mean again that that's a long piece of hair and i can just call this uh long strand and um i'll hide it let's let's make a new let's make a new particle system right another hair one like i'll reading this one wrong look at another situation where you where you have like the name of the particle system but also the the name of the particle settings like i said why can't just be one thing i don't know um but i guess you know redundancy helps sometimes so here let's call this one afro right so let's make something that resembles like an afro um first of all i would probably add a subdivision surface modifier level of two and i'll put it before all of these so that way it's just sort of working off of all the all the data there and i go back in here and um remember this one i have it turned off the long strand and i'll rename my afro okay cool so let me just turn down my hair length and again we're just going to go through all these things we're going to think about what does an afro look like right so i will this is not a hair shading tutorial but that will come next with actually doing character hair um but for now i'm just going to work on some lighting here um and we're looking at all of these we have a little spike ball right now and that's what we should have i'm going to shade this smooth that's what we should have right i mean we didn't do anything crazy we just have this we have these hair pieces that are again they're triangles they're little cones popping out and um we want to alter these so so what are some things we have to do first well the first thing and we're not sculpting this right now so i don't have to i don't have to worry about um the path steps up here which is already set for six because we did that earlier but um i just want to focus here in the viewport display so i want to make sure i have ample segments so i'm going to turn these segments of the 12 even though i don't need that many because the hair is shorter um i'm just going to keep there anyway and i'm going to turn my strand steps up to seven because that's maximum if your pc can't handle seven you know try something around four or five um but two is just not enough um seven just so i can see and i like to make sure for the render i check b spline and that just helps get a little smoother of a of a hair render so it's time to start playing with these settings so if i click on interpolated we're now here in the children and let's look through the render tab what do we got okay a big puff ball with with 10 000 follicles of hair right because i'm viewing 10 and the number is 1000 and again even though i'm in even though i'm in rendered view right now we're still in the viewport display so that means we have 10 we're displaying 10 even though it's rendered view uh whenever on if i bring the camera here right if i give this little render here you'll see that there's a whole lot more there and actually look at did the other hair as well there's a whole lot more hair here because now there's a hundred thousand pieces there let me actually also turn off the render for that one okay cool cool so let us let's keep going here so um the first thing that's going to just take this design far is just adding randomness to it and suddenly look at this it's just cool like it's very cool we have just this hairy looking thing with the hair just curl all over the place this will get you a long way like from the start just adding randomness to it and that that's a great starting place um but because it's afro i want to do curly hair so i'll go to the kink type add curl and you're going to see all this weirdness happening when it's on such a small scale you want to turn the amplitude way down like 0.01 and then it's helpful to actually turn the random off so you see what you're working with at first and now you can start to see that it's it's doing this um we want more frequency so go from two to eight and now we have all these curlies popping out all right let's do um change frequency to five for now and then if i go back and i add randomness we just we quickly have a curly random little little hair ball here so you can see that there's all sorts of ways to to craft the shape of a hair particle system and using these will help get you there so in the next part we're going to go through and we're actually going to use what we learned to create a hair system for a character and look into doing a little bit of hair sculpting so thanks for watching drop any comments in the in the comment thing below and subscribe take care

Channel: FruitZeus

Views: 8,412

Keywords: Blender Hair Tutorial, How To Make Hair In Blender, How to make hair particle systems in blender, Hair Particle System Blender, Hair Particle System, Hair Particle System Blender 2.93, Blender Hair Tutorial 2.93, Blender 2.93 Tutorial, Hair Children, Particle System Tutorial, Understanding Blender Hair, Blender Hair, Blender 2.93 Hair, The Hair Particle System, Hair Particle, How To Make Hair Blender, Blender Particle System, Blender 2.93 Particle

Id: lV4_GQgWBMY

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021