Part 5 : Hair

Hair is always a tricky part to do, and it has been is a special part in this project too, as I did lots of tests with diferent methods until I found one that worked. First I tried with the hair plugin that comes with max, but I was really unhappy with the results (same happened everytime I've tried it, but for some reason I keep trying again and again). It was really slow to render, I was getting lots of random errors that were reseting all the combing I had done and the result wasn't half as good as I expected.

The second method I tried was the old textured planes method, and I got a decent looking hair in the T-pose model, but once I rendered it in the final pose with the final lighting it wasn't looking well.

I almost finished with that textured planes method, but I decided to give a try to hairfx plugin (or hairtrix, as that's the last version where you have hairfx and ornatrix plugins combined). The results couldn't make me happier, I was able to create the new hair starting from 0 very fast and easy, and the result was very nice (or thats what I think at least). Considering the small amount of time I spent doing tests with this plugin (as I wanted to finish the image as fast as possible at that point) I can't wait to use it in a new project to see what else can it do. There are some hairfx tutorials that would explain how to create hair with it better than what I can explain here, but I can share a couple of tips I've learned while doing it.

First, even if the last versions of the plugin can render in mental ray, the render times become crazy, so I found much easier to render the hair in scanline in a separate pass, and then to combine them in photoshop. Finally, with all this kind of hair plugins, I always try to create the hair using different hair settings and growing objects for each zone. That gives me much more control on the hairstile than if I try to create the whole hair growing from a single mesh. Appart from that, the process for creating hair is easy, you just have to keep creating growing zones and hair guides to define the hairstile you want.



<-- Close up of the final Picture



Links

Dani Garcia's Website

Dani Garcia's Homepage on CG Gallery

Email : w o o d y [\-at/] w o o d y s 3 d. c o m