The Main Character - Hair pt1

I wanted to approach the character's hair by making it more realistic, and less stylized than before.

I felt that in our test model, and previous characters I've made, the hair has looked too blocky and almost like plastic.

I started off by experimenting with the fibermesh options inside zBrush.

I began by masking off and grouping certain parts of the character's scalp. I then clicked on the fibermesh tool and generated some hair.

I used the groom hair ball tool to ball, the hairs up into their different groups, so that they would be easier to style.

I then followed this by using the various grooming tools to help style the hair how I wanted.

I then exported the hair and sent it into 3dsmax.

In its current state, however, the hair was way too high poly to be used in a game engine. I instead used a tool to convert it to splines, which I could then use in conjunction with 3ds Max's built in hair plugin to create some low poly hair planes.

I still tweaked and moved the planes until I was happy with their overall layout. 

Using xNormal I attempted to bake the high poly fibermesh into the low poly plane's textures.

However, the result was messy and I couldn't really get the result I desired:

I think this method, although interesting to learn, is not really a worthwhile one to pursue. I find it too messy and confusing and overall I was not happy with the results.

I think in future, it would be worth investigating creating a low poly mesh first from the head, then add planes as an extra detail afterwards.