Sculpting Hair? BEST Workflow

in this demo i'm going to go over how to make 3d sculpted hair within zed brush so using different tools and techniques to take a sphere and sort of make volume and masses around the head uh usually what you'll find is you're either making sculpted hair for presentation or maybe like a stylized game um the second unit would be something more akin to a triple a character where you'd have hair cards which might be generated by xgen and then you'd have the isolated incident when you're rendering something where it would actually use different tools like xgen to to render different fibers but here we're focusing on actually sculpting like you classically would with normal clays and it's really good technique to know because all of those workflows that i just mentioned usually stem from this subject so you'd get a concept try and um almost design a hairstyle and then take it down and deviate it to the workflow of your desire so really useful technique for understanding how to sculpt hair with within zed brush so first i'm going to start with this demo head now if you press comma to bring up this window you'll be able to find a couple of projects and it's called demo head female so just a nice simple practice for for making hair usually the way i like to start out is collecting you know collecting loads of references getting to understand what sort of hairstyle you're making um but also at the same time appreciating that the hair is going to look different on different face structures etc so potentially going on pinterest and searching about can be a useful technique for understanding where your hair is going to be directed and how it's going to flow and how it's going to occur and things like that so getting started the first thing i like to do is come down to my subtools and then to append what we're going to do is start by making a sphere and it's going to form the basis of the head i'm just going to use gizmos to realign it and readjust it around the cranium just to get a good shape there we go here complete um next thing i do is come down to dynamesh just so every time we make different changes to the shape we can update the geometry um so under dynamesh i'm just going to toggle dynamesh on now the primary purpose at this stage is to focus on the silhouettes or the hairline of the character so i'm going to turn on symmetry by pressing x and then i'm just going to use any tool it's up to you i prefer using only uh maybe one or two talks for this stage but any tool to get the desired uh result which would be the hairline so everyone's got different comfortabilities with brushes for this i'm going to use the move brush so i've got that that hot keyed so it set my access and i'm just going to move this blob around to form a slight hairline i'm not stressing about it too much i know it's going to change as i go along but it's a good place to start with the next part i'd probably try and trim down this sculpture to the cranium a bit more uh because it's looking a bit like an afro i'm gonna use trim dynamic so trim dynamics is a really useful brush in the sense that wherever i do my brush things it's going to take a chunk off the clay and i can use this to move the camera around do little strokes and basically shape the start of the hair so i'm trying to get it as close to the head as possible just so i can have that starting point um if it goes into the hair for now don't worry too much because we can just bring that back i'm just trying to find the key shape so any place that it does start to poke through that's okay um i'm gonna use a clay brush and basically the clay brush is gonna fill in any indentations um i'm not focused on making it nice and neat just yet because i know i'm gonna smooth it over once that is done i usually get quite a large brush and then hold shift and just smooth things out to get that initial shape so if you're making short hair obviously you've got a far shorter task and then compared to the long hair but for today i think what we're going to do is just make um quite long long hair so the first thing um i'd want to do is if i come into dynamesh and then i press control i'm just going to recalculate the mesh so i've got the geometry that i need next point we're going to use a brush called a snake hook so when we come to the brushes section we've got snake hook here it's also under uh if you press b s and h that brings up a snake hook so the feature of a snake hook is that when you click and drag you can bring out these um sort of these hooks or these tentacles really good useful tool for making hair at this stage but the problem is that the geometry isn't getting supported so i think it has as of 2020 or 2019 i can't remember there's a new feature in zed brush which is called sculptris pro so when you come up here there'll be this little icon if it's not there you don't have it in the um the most up-to-date version but when we activate that and we also have snake hook enabled you'll see that the cursor turns purple so now that when we make movements uh it's generating topology as we go and we don't have to worry about re-dynameshing anything or kind of like smoothing things over so that's that's a really cool way of making individual strands of hair we're not going to dive into that straight away that's too much of a kind of like a third read or a unique piece that we do but what we can do is use it in a way uh almost like a move brush while and what's going to happen is going to update our topology as we're moving so with normal move brush if we were sort of like bringing out volumes of hair we'd start to find that there was this geometry stretching and then that can be really annoying when you're concepting forms and masses however if you come to the snake hook and because we have sculptures pro activated and now if we use this as we would with a standard move tool you can see that it's moving the masses but it's also updating the geometry at the same time so this fundamental of using sculptris and snakehook we're going to use that to form the main masses of the hair so right here i've turned off um symmetry i kind of want to make this an asymmetric haircut um thinking about the largest forms possible i'm just going to make some some large hair and think about with loads of small brushes and movements sort of like clicking and letting go like this not not large ones because that's going to draw out a massive um a massive spool but i'm focusing on the edges of the edges of the silhouette and making primary forms so from this i'm just going to go ahead and make the main structure of the head so at this stage um the primary areas i'm looking at and what how i make decisions on moving things is basically looking at curvatures so you'd get this from your references and studying how like the hair falls but if you look here just trying to follow natural curves and um also turning the perspectives a lot like looking at it from the side and trying to achieve the same things um we want to make nice nice sort of curves that follow follow nicely but also achieve that at most angles so making it look good from the top the bottom and the side so there's something this is looking a bit more of like a classic classic haircut um also do focus at the bottom just to make sure that it's not intersecting with the neck um and then you've got good follow-ons and different shapes at different points just remember at this stage we're not necessarily thinking about individual strands of hair but more um how they're going to look when they're all clumped together so in my head i've got um i'm imagining where this hair is going to flow i'm imagining where it's potentially going to split and how that's going to be brought together if at any point you want to bring out a feature this is sort of like a 3d concepting stage so maybe i'd like some more hair coming out from this side quite simply what i can do is you know get the snake hook with that tool and then start dragging out more hair so the entire sculpt is really malleable once we've got it at this stage and it's just about getting from a distance and seeing how how the hair can be formed um if you're making a game character i wouldn't go so artistic like this i wouldn't kind of make it be have it flowing around everywhere but just for the sake of showing how to sculpt hair i'm going to do a demonstration of how you can kind of use these tools so say i'm happy with um the overall look from a distance in the silhouettes we can start thinking about um refining the clumps that uh are there so for example when i was making this silhouette i could imagine that a piece of hair was going to be leading from the front and then sort of like whisping over and coming all the way down so if you wanted to define something like that i suggest using the clay tubes brush and then just using small feathers at a large a large size and then kind of following the forms that you would have made previously i'd leave them kind of rough and dirty at the moment not really focusing on small small brushes like that for hair but more larger clumps at this stage we're thinking about now splitting this mass into smaller sections or layers of hair so maybe if i decided that she's gonna have a bit of a parting so maybe half of her hair is going to go to the right side and then some to the left side then what i can also use is a dam standard so damian standard brush and then i can just draw that in so once that's drawn in um and i like how it looks i might be able to reposition it with a move brush just to to get more feeling so with any sort of sculpting task it's about inserting landmarks and shapes and then refining with the move and then coming in putting in more landmarks and shapes and then coming back and repositioning it so right now i want a bit more of an indication of where hair is getting directed from the head so where it's flowing so i'm just going to use clay tubes and i'm going to use quite a large brush and i'm going to brush in the direction where the hair is starting from and then going to be leading off too i don't have to finish it all the way down because what i'm going to do is just going to get a very large brush and then smooth this all away so i can i can barely see it but uh there is a bit of a visual representation that is going to go in that direction um so i'm just going to do the same side and basically uh refine some of these shapes so i can see what they look like so right here what i'm doing is just uh getting an idea of the direction and flow and then using quite a large brush so what you'll find is the nature of this brush is quite harsh on the edges so if i do make quite a large indentation like this what it's going to do is it's going to create this natural splitting which i can then focus on later and refine depending on how it looks so it's all about accidentally making these edges which you can later come back and refine so once we've got basically the high concept uh and the shape and the general direction of the hair that we want it's uh it's now about splitting up this hair into individual components so they can be managed and affected by differently so uh say for example i was moving and splitting parts of the hair it's going to be difficult because when i make movements here it's going to adjust onto the left side and the right side so how i'm going to do that is i'm going to isolate the hair so just by clicking solo and then you see we've got this lovely sort of clay happening i'm then going to come to masking and then with the mask selected i'm going to change the brush and then change it to mask lasso so by default you probably have it to mask pen so selecting mask lasso i can hold ctrl and then just basically draw out a section and for my haircut here i'm finding a natural split down the center um so that's just splitting this this volume of hair that i'm going to be using and the other other side maybe i can later split this into two separate pieces as well so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna come down with this mask selected come to split and then split to mass points and that's basically gonna split in two um left with this hole but because it's a dynamesh it's already dynameshed i can hold ctrl just draw a shape on the outside let go and it's going to reform and reclose up these holes so i just want to do that with the other side read dynamesh uh now when i come out and unhide them i've now got two separate pieces um so this is the direction that it's gonna be heading in is we're just gonna start splitting pieces and also adding them later if you look and we now come and start to edit this this part we can have really defined splits and that's where where the look of the hair starts to come out so if i press alt and click it's going to click onto individual subtools so now i can come in and start to refine it so my next my next goal is just to make some interesting splits and shapes and layers using this technique so just following that so at any point in this stage you can start to add in little indicators and landmarks so for example uh here is a bit more transparent in which way we're taking it and what secondary clumps are going to basically pop up whereas this one's quite a basic one so what i might want to do is get something like a dam standard and then just draw indication lines and that's going to help my eye when it comes to moving the rest of this clay so for example i can now start to generate a little bit of a secondary split by coming to the snake hook and then just trying to adapt these and work out how these going to split up even further um i could ev even supported some of these lines with clay tubes so just bulking up different sections so when we're looking at the silhouette it's a little bit more interesting than just like a flat a flat surface again at every stage i suggest just smoothing it out because we don't we don't be looking at details and get bogged down by the details we just want to look at masses and silhouettes so here i'm really focusing on the clumps uh and getting more into the secondary form so it's introducing more of the dam standards and the clay and a little bit less of the move brush um so basically we've got one two three sections here and i'm just splitting them up manually i wouldn't suggest going too far with the separate subtools um only start to separate them as sub tools when it becomes a bit unmanageable so for example um this little feature here i might want to split that off separately so that when i'm working on this sort of fringe piece that comes around the back of the ear i'm not going to accidentally be breaking um this section so you might want to think about you know masking that off and splitting it like this so we could just come with control mask it and then come to split mask points and then we're left with um our re-dynameshed hair basically just make sure dynamesh is on so the reason we don't put massive massive detail is because every time we dynamesh we're going to lose that um quality but to a certain extent that's quite nice because it keeps you keeps on track with the main purpose which is the the overall shapes but you can always put in further resolution here by just turning up and pressing dynamesh a cool way to do the hair points is once you've got the dam standard what you can do is put in somewhat of a split and then support that with um the opposite of a dam standard which is holding alt and it's basically going to give you this nice sharp transition that's a really cool way of splitting parts of the hair so when it comes to sculpting hair you're not thinking about sculpting individual stat strands but it's more about sculpting separations so when we're doing this sort of this direction and the form our main purpose is to split parts of the hair not necessarily draw them individually because that can come at a later date so for example if i want to make an interesting split here all that i do is maybe put a damn standard following in the direction the general direction and then maybe using the opposite of a dance stand to create like a layer and then bulking that up with clay tubes just to give it some more mass so this stage i got a general sense of the rhythm of the hair so lots of damn standard streaks that are kind of splitting off these main sections that we made into individual pieces uh at the top a bit more detail uh when it comes to hair and it kind of like splitting off at points with a very short damn standard but then also rejoining back onto itself so this is where um clay tubes have kind of like converged and then turned into one one giant mass so when you're making hair that's an observation that you want to make and then start having clumps of hair joining each other and then at some point splitting off so for example maybe where the hair is catching a bit of wind i can insert just a very small dam standard that starts and finishes here to here and then that gives the indication that the the hair strands are kind of like opening up uh and you can see i've done the same on the inside so this is just an indication that the hair is sort of like fanning out whereas um if you've got uh sort of more flat parts of the hair which are being stretched down on the head you just want some basic flat pieces that can be uh smoothed out and flattened with maybe one or two two parts depending on what style of hair it is um so the next bit what i'm gonna do is just what i'll call moving on to the secondary forms um and secondary silhouettes so it's just about tightening these up so the tips don't look like tentacles they more look like strands of hair a really useful tool for this is uh something called the pinch tool so when you whenever you come to the ends uh selecting a brush called pinch and then what i suggest doing is turning off sculptures pro because we want to keep all the information that we've had we just want to clump bits of clay together so if i come and brush down in the direction of the hair it's going to pinch the ends together and that's going to give like a nice hair effect visual it's really great getting rid of like the blobby bits that were created when doing the initial snake hooks another trick we can use is making individual hair strands and then starting to move and manipulate them back onto the asset so if i come to append and basically bringing another sphere just like how we started the hair uh only this time i'm going to kind of make it a bit turn smaller into a dynamesh down here reuse the snakehook technique so bsh for snakehook i'm then going to basically drag out an individual hair so maybe something that i can give some shape to i can make numerous amounts of these and maybe even put like intricate details so when it comes to making an individual strand like this maybe i can put some uh damn standard forms in there sort of like some details just to make sure you do want to focus a bit of time on this because especially if it's being duplicated uh you do want to spend some time on it so just making sure that the tips are nice and it's not going to cause any issues but basically once we've got that we can use duplication so i'm just going to duplicate that individual strand and then use the gizmo so with the gizmo i can alt click and then reposition the pivot point while holding this corner piece onto roundabout where i want the hair to start and then because it is a duplicate piece i can bring it off and then start to rotate and position it into places that i like so maybe i want to cover up the the split that's happening here i'm just going to make the hair strand smaller or give it some additional layers you know so it's not just starting and finishing at the end and because this is quite a large clump it's got that nice form so i'm going to roughly position it here it doesn't have to be perfect because what i'm now going to do is i'm going to use the move brush and then start to reposition that back into place and i can be quite aggressive with this so i can start bringing out the hair and you know seating it back onto the sculpt what i would suggest is this hair can get out of ha hands so like if you're adding loads of clumps and hair strands it's going to naturally bulk out so at some points what you might want to do is after you've placed a hair strand like this is uh go underneath and just give a little push back onto the head because you know people's hairs aren't that thick so once i've done that i can now start to push it in and further refine it even uh make the silhouette maybe a bit more complicated by drawing pieces out but you can start to see with this workflow how you can get like some basic shapes and then add more complexity and more complexity onto it so even even with this piece i can now duplicate it again and then reposition it in a different location and maybe give it a different shape off to the side so i'm going to reshape it here just so i can see it now i'm going to place it more to the front of the head um if you hold alt with the gizmo selected you can sort of draw out this this manipulator and i finish and point at the end of the hair and that gives me like a nice straight line that i can use the gizmo with so just going to position it near the front you know even what you could do is make this really really small and then have it as more of like a a defined feature you know like a the flick of a hair um with this what i'm going to do is i'm going to have it bleed naturally into the to the first sculpt i did so um just connecting it all back into the hair and making clumps at some point i maybe even want to replace this piece so i could just uh delete that because we separated it earlier and now i can focus on making uh something that's a bit more more refined so i'm just going to do that across the hair to a certain extent till we move on to the next tool so before i was talking about um opening and closing parts of the head basically depending on how much like air is being lifted or how flat is being flushed against each other uh you can do that with the subtools so what you might want to do is have it naturally uh originate from the same sort of direction uh have it sort of follow the the hair that you originally made and then what you can do is have it separate off ever so slightly and then have it split off into another section so it depends how crazy you want the hair to be maybe you want this to go back into the hair flow and then that gives like a nice separation so you can see how you can get through duplication and using multiple subtools you can get all these transitions uh these really nice sharp transitions that would either be otherwise be quite hard to sculpt manually with like a dynamic brush and things like that so use the duplications to your advantage and then all the sculpting that we did was really to focus on uh the overall shapes and primary forms so another technique that i like to use is say we've got this individual piece of hair so i can select that this is how it looks as a separate sub tool what i can do is i can just duplicate that now i've got two that are separated on top of each other when i come to moving the brush i can just move one section and now what i've got is a strand of hair that starts in the same place and finishes in the same place so what what's happening here is the hair's just splitting off and that can be like a really cool effect so that's a cool technique but i would leave that towards the end just to not make things so complicated but that tool is always uh to your disposal for this example i'm just going to kind of put it back into the hair maybe create a bit more splitting and volume here that i otherwise wouldn't get with my brush so whenever we have a strand of hair that's a little bit too long and we want to sort of shorten it uh because we've got sculptures pro activated i can just hold shift and almost delete the edges because it's going to infinitely smooth back into itself so that's a nice way of cutting cutting the hair up so just at this stage i'm thinking about i'm not too fast with the individual pieces here because it's gonna it would end up being a really long demo but uh i'm just gonna make the the main features of the character the things that sort of like define her so i'm just gonna finish up by making some bangs and then do another technique which is similar to this so the final technique i'm going to show is a really cool and quick way of making these interesting shapes so similar to how we did these hair strands i'm going to come to a pen and then select a 3d cylinder this time so if i bring the cylinder off to the side and then turn it off turn it to dynamesh i'm then gonna basically reduce it in size to somewhat of a hair strand um and now i'm gonna smooth it over so once i smooth it over it doesn't matter sort of like the edges that get deleted a bit and then i'm going to get uh damn standard and just the standard brush and then generate these lines just a random bits of information doesn't matter how accurate they are just yet uh and also the stat standard brush just to create uh what could be considered like individual hair strands but more more clumps so something like this uh once i've put all that sort of like random noise and generation in i can come to um the move brush and under the move brush there's a cog up here which gives us some deformation options we're gonna make use of that uh by using twist deformers and curved warmers so but the first thing i want to do is because we've made these strands uh if i come to the gizmo and then sort of increase the size from the strands we make you can see that they stretch out and give this sort of like fair uh hair effect so you could use this for a tool and just sort of like place it on the hair for individual clamps but right now i'm going to use the gizmo so with the gizmo selected if i hold alt and then i can just draw out the center and then take it from the side if i click this icons you know settings option i can come to uh twist so once i click twist it puts the hair in into this box uh now if i take these little triangle shapes and then click and drag them it's going to twist the hair so i twist the hair as much as you wanted depending on how much like flow you want so i can twist the bottom as well once i'm happy with that i'm going to click the cogs icon again and then just come back to the gizmo selected here i can also just press accept so it's going to accept the the defamation i made at this point i'm basically going to get the pinch tool the one we used earlier and i'm going to turn off the sculpture smoke so i don't want it to change the topology and then i'm just going to feather it down and sort of create a taper off and maybe smooth it in parts uh i'm also going to use the move brush to sort of just give it a bit of form and structure so what you can see happening in here is we can use this as the tool to make some quite major looks of hair and clumps of hair so i'm going to keep that because i might want to use it later and i'm just going to duplicate it and then just like we had with this strand of hair i'm going to i'm going to move it to the side um i want all this information to pretty much replace the sculpting concept that i did here just so i can get a bit more information and refinement out of it so i'm also going to use another tool again in the customize cog section and this time going to use something called uh bend curve so what bend curve does it brings up these options it might be aligned and it might not be aligned but what we want is dots leading all the way from the top to the bottom so the way you can change that is if you come to the red section and start to scroll back and forth this red little little cone i'm going to switch it until my starting point is up here my end points down there you'll just see it has two dots so once that's happened i can then come to the end cone here which is like an orange one and basically once i click and drag it's going to increase the amount of dots along that axis or the resolution so i'm going to start with a low resolution now once that's once that's in place what i can do is i can now click and drag these points and basically use them as a curve tool to place my hair in certain places so what i'm going to do is probably can see is happening is sort of try and follow the original sculpt that i made so it can be as rough as possible because we can come back later and just use normal sculpting to change it but i'm going to try and abide a little bit by by the sculpting forms that we did if you want to refine that even further once you've come in and put this in what we can do is add some more resolution and then you can change them at different increments but i don't really suggest that for hair what i do is just come out of the cog mode accept that and then use the move tool to move it in the way that we want using a large move brush so when i solo it that's the one we're working with and now i can just make little little movements to shape the hair the way that i want it doesn't need to be super accurate for this i just want it to feed back in to the forms that we already did and just give it a bit more resolution so when it comes to sculpting hair and refining it even further we can use that technique to get loads of cool streak information we can start to clump it back onto the original first draft mesh that we did and then we can start to smooth it potentially back onto the mesh just so it looks decent so overall what you do i won't finish it off but you'd use those techniques in in conjunction so starting with a sphere and then splitting up into large form components creating individual sort of strands that we can then put on top of the hair that we already made so this would be more like the secondary forms and then if we want to put extra extra details in we can use this technique to make hair clumps and then try and place them within the hair that we already made so if you did want to replace this piece all we'd have to do is select on the original mesh and then just uh either smooth it out or use the trim brush to kind of like hide it back into the original hair so we keep the hair shape that we originally intended but it's just getting replaced by sort of like more high quality hair i'm just going to pinch this off so yeah rinse and repeat rinse and repeat and once you go through this process and a little bit of practice because you won't get it first time um you'll have something you'll have a set of sculptable hair that you can use for your game characters

Channel: Virtus Creative

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Id: 8S5xKSoalw8

Length: 37min 11sec (2231 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020