Hair! Trickiest to make.

Hair! Trickiest to make.

Originally shared by Serene Jewell

Everything I know about mesh hair...

Making mesh hair for virtual worlds is hard. If it were easy, there would be more nice inexpensive rigged mesh hair.  My first Blender project was hair and I wish I had started with a table instead. :-)

If you rendered every strand of hair on a head, it would be far too high poly and you would lag every region you visit. Therefore the Blender hair particle system is a bad idea (for now.)

Instead, we need to think of hair in terms of clumps, not strands. This vimeo video gives a good idea of how to think of clumps of hair.  https://vimeo.com/15274535   And a similar one from Masterxeon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqUXaISODkA (though I would texture that strand before duplicating it!)  Here’s another video that I originally posted for +Tyra Balan. It shows how one designer uses even bigger clumps of hair. This is more like the Truth hair you would find in SL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsslleGjJY

The general process here is:
--Create a plane, smooth, make it into a long leaf shape.
--Unwrap it, and texture it
--Shift D to copy it and begin placing leafs around the head
--Repeat until shapes are right
--Join it all.
--If the hair is long, you may need to rig it.
--Export and upload.

If you want to add moving wispy bits, you can add flexiprims inworld. I’m seeing more of that in SL these days.

The Blender skills needed are:
--Creating planes
--Get a model (Avastar, Make Human or other)
--Manipulate vertices
--Use proportional editing a lot
--Patience.

Honestly, I can’t believe there isn’t a better method by now. I keep thinking that any someone will come along with an easy low poly mesh hair maker. If you see one, let me know!
https://vimeo.com/15274535