Ouch! Hair...

That's one of the still unsolved major problems in 3D rendering.
And I'm not just talking about hair movement which can, to a degree, be faked for still renders.

There are two basic hair "models":

1. Strand hair, as created by the "Hair Room".
2. Transmapped hair which is still the most common.

There you are, and thank you for your reply:


How this was set up:

• The hair is my heavily modded version of "GraceLionHair" by the artist "Quarker".
• The texture is custom too, without burnt-in highlights (beware of those! They can ruin everything!).
• Rendered with Bagginsbill's "Environment Sphere" with just one infinite light coming from 45 degrees left and 45 degrees above the camera.

• [[File:f7t117p684n158.zip|none|auto]]

Don't be confused that the shader preview in the Mat Room screenshot looks like the original "GraceLion" texture map - it isn't!
It's just the overlaid "GraceLion" transparency map which causes this preview.

The maps I used:

• Transparency from "GraceLionHair"
  
• Diffuse map
  

• At the hair roots you have little specularity and bump
• The closer to the hair tips it goes, the more specularity is added, also this effect is even increased by the augmenting bump.

Oups - I saw your reply too late!

Yes, I picked that hair on purpose because it's still one of my favourite hairs.
It's simple, straightforward, and very much "EveryDay" which makes it a welcome candidate for normal girls hair.
The character you see is a custom sculpt made after a girl I once knew, half a life ago.
So using this hair with this particular style was paramount (50% of a character are made by the hair!)

In fact I once had also increased the thickness of the back hair by adding a copy of the back strands (ca. down below the ear level) to the back to give it a fuller look.
Unfortunately i can't find it again. I'm afraid that I deleted the modified .obj file in a runtime migration.

Look at the bright side! [cool]
You can use the "specular/bump map from my previous post!

Later,

Karina

Aye, Please do so!

Thank you

K

I didn't try yet what a Google search would bring up (duh! never thought of that...)

Actually I made my textures by cannibalizing other good textures.
If I find a great looking hair texture -->without highlights<--, and the strands running over all the height of the map, I take it into my image editing.

Here I cut the broadest strip of hair, duplicate it a couple of times and then glue them together one besides the other.
Try making the seams almost innoticeable; the clone brush can help to fix minor glitches.
To avoid a tiling effect, mirror every odd strand, glue some together with an overlap, slightly change the strand widths (+- ten per cent).
Be creative!:)

Once you have a nice looking map, you can quite easily produce other colours by playing with the HSB values.
Blonde hair is especially suited for making different colour, dark hair not so.

Over time I made myself a collection of different hair colours which I can use and fine tune as needed.
E.G., if I need thinner or thicker looking hair, I simply change the texture's U_Scale value!

Note:
Your new map mustn't be absolutely seamless. And it mustn't be seamless along the Y axis either.

Note 2:
If you come across a hair which has a really weird UV map, you can still use one of your maps as "donor":
Just copy parts of it and copy it into the weird map, resizing, rotating,clipping... whatever is needed.
FK Design's "Twin Fair Hair" is a good example:


All this is a lot of work just to get rid of the burnt-in highlights.
But over time you'll build your own texture library, and you'll be amazed on how many hair models you can use your shader and your maps instead of the original one.


Oh, and one more thing:

Start collecting skull caps (or better, learn how to make them yourselves)!
These simple props will make you more flexible because now you can set any hair's built-in "scalp" map to transparency 1.000 and ignore it furtherto.

This is especially useful if you are "styling" the hair with the Morph Brush:
You don't need to worry about creating or selecting groups for the Morph Brush to work on, in order to avoid deforming the built-in skull cap with it too: Just morph away!


EXTRA: How to make a skull cap:

1. Load the hair of your choice
2. Conform it to a STANDARD V4 (or SASHA)
3. A brief visit to the Material Room will tell you the name of the skull cap or scalp material. Remember this!
4. Select the hair figure's "neck" (because that's usually the main group in a hair).
5. Open the Group Editor and click "New Group". (Your new group name may not contain spaces!)
6. Click the "Add" button.
   In the drop-down list, click "Material" and select the material of the skull cap.
   The polygons of the skull cap should all be RED now.
7. Click "Create Prop" in the lower part of the Group Editor's window, and give your new prop a name.
8. Close the Group Editor.
9. Don't save the hair back to the library! Simply delete it.
10. Parent the newly created skull cap to V4/SASHA's head and save it (as a prop) instead!
    If asked "save as a smart prop?" click OK.
11. That's it. Congratulations on your new independent skull cap!

Aye - I know I sometimes get overboard with my lengthy replies to even trivial issues.

However, if I explain something I either do it right or not at all.

And as you've already mentioned:
While you certainly have advanced knowledge about a topic, others may not have.
That's the one thing that is always in the back of my mind when writing such posts.
(you can also see this in the manuals that come with my products)

Thank you for the compliment![cool]

K