Creating hair

At first, I was actually considering creating real hair from fibermesh but I decided to try hair from planes as it is supposed to be a game character and for real-time rendering hair like that doesn't work so easily. However, hair made from planes had its difficulties and I probably spent the most time on it. All the planes needed to cover half of her head (because the other side is shaven) but it was a difficult task as the hair on planes is more transparent than I thought. I had to create many planes of different shapes and lengths to achieve natural looking hair after texturing. The research for making this was not easy either as I was not able to find many tutorials.

When it came to UV mapping, the hair was actually the first thing I did, because I wanted to try to texture it as soon as possible. I found out that this new version of Maya has different UV mode which looked much better than the previous one. In the beginning, I didn't have a good understanding of UV mapping. I knew you basically cut the mesh and create seams like unwrapping an animal pelt, but unwrapping planes so I can texture hair? Planes are not like an animal and I can't really create a pelt from that. I was following a video tutorial (link here) which has English subtitles and the first thing I noticed was he created straight UV maps and I wasn't sure how.

After many hours spent looking for a solution and trying to do it manually with unwrapping and sewing each polygon (which is not possible, do not even try it) I came across a tutorial which showed me easy steps for this: UV Planar based - unitize - move and sew - unfold along U and V. 

Taking it to Substance Painter was the first step to learn how to use the software, and looking back at it now, I should have started with an easier goal than hair. But I had the tutorial and I expected it to work. Of course, CG is not that easy. So I followed the steps of the artist just to achieve a few steps and then he did SOMETHING that made the hair nice, transparent and soft but I couldn't figure it out.

My biggest flaw when it comes to doing art (and many other things too) is that I am not patient with development. I feel like it needs to be perfect for the first time or I do not want to do it. It makes me very anxious when I create anything and I am still learning how to fight it. So I was just trying to follow that tutorial, it was not working, and I had no idea why mainly because I still didn't know the software. So after some time, I achieved some kind of transparency but because that time I did not know the software properly, I am not even able to tell how I did it, I just know I was trying to use smart material of fur, as the artist in the previously mentioned video. When I tried to render it, it was too transparent and the single hairs were too thick and blurry.

One of the game art students advised me to create a base mesh for the hair around the scalp, that will be darker and will help the hair to be less transparent the way we can see the scalp. I tried to texture it too but I still had the same issue - it was too thick and too transparent at the same time, didn't have nice hair ends, and was too blurry.

So what I did was that I left it be. It felt like I was giving up but I couldn't afford to spend that much time solving hair when I had the rest of the body to texture. After some time, I learned more about the program by texturing other parts of the character, doing texture tests and then the actual final textures (which you can see all in my other blog post) and I left the hair to the end. I knew it was going to be the most difficult because I couldn't seem to be figuring it out. 

After more struggles with the fur smart material and not enough/too much transparency (and not enough tutorials) I came across this tutorial (link here) in Korean (I suppose?) which didn't even have subtitles but with my knowledge of the software I was able to guess what to do. I have got a new approach to the texturing, got textures of the hair and in photoshop created 3 textures - grey hair texture, black and white texture for opacity, and normal (which I didn't know how to create and after looking at tutorials my photoshop had some kind of bug in filters so I didn't have the right one there) I used this website for creating normal maps online http://www.smart-page.net/smartnormal/

I saved them from photoshop looking like this (I had 4 different UV maps for hair as they didn't fit into one and one of them is darker for the base hair and one is lighter to create highlights).

Then I imported hair mesh into Substance Painter, baked smooth high poly version from ZBrush on the top of it, and imported these three textures into my shelf. The first one was used on a fill layer with all modes on and also added another fill with only colour enabled to colour it pink. Then I created another fill layer enabling only opacity and put the black and white map there, which created the desired transparency. The last fill layer had only normal enabled. Then I exported textures, put them into Marmoset Toolbag and I can say it looked much better. It was still a little bit too transparent but it had the look I hoped for and after so many hours spending on texturing just hair, I was very happy with the outcome, because I have learned how to create hair the way I wanted it to be, and the only way of fixing this would be just creating more planes.

Eyebrows and eyelashes were made with the same method using planes and the same process with textures as with hair. 

Overall I am satisfied with the result of creating hair from planes. It showed me why I have decided for a project like this - to learn new things and solve any obstacles I might encounter. Every issue with the modelling or the texturing part gave me an opportunity to think and search for a solution and even when I didn't find the answer I needed, it helped me to develop my skills further.