Making Hair for a 3D Printed Character
I've been focusing on making better looking character faces lately, because faces are hard! Part of that has involved learning to make hair, too. There are a ton of great tutorials out there for making faces, but most of the tutorials are geared towards visual arts, rather than 3D printing. For the most part, that's actually fine, as a face for a 3D printed 32mm miniature doesn't need all of the detail that a face for a 3D rendered character would have, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add in extra detail!
Hair can be another matter though. I've read/watched a lot of hair tutorials and there seem to be a few different techniques that are popular.
The first is really only useful to visual artists, which is to use the Particle system in Blender to make the hair. This works great for rendering things on screen because you can make thousands of hairs and then style them as needed, but it doesn't work too well for 3D printing. I have used versions of this technique (such as for the feathers on my Vermling Shaman's cape), but I've not found it useful for hair.
The next technique that I've seen a lot of people use is to model the hair through normal geometry. This is typically done through either cube extrusion or through sculpting, and if you've got solid artistic chops, I think this is an excellent option. This is the approach that I've used in the past, but I've never been really happy with the results that I've been able to achieve with sculpted hair.
The last technique uses a bunch of bezier curves to define the shapes of the hair. If you know me, you can probably already tell that this is my favorite ;) I actually watched a video about this technique many months ago, when I was first working with bezier curves on my Giant Viper model, but at that point I was just looking for general pointers for how to use curves and so pretty much forgot the details. A couple of weeks ago (since I've been on this mission to improve my face modelling skills), I was watching one of YanSculpts's videos on face sculpting... and about an hour and five minutes into it, he began using this technique to make the character's hair!
Watching him work sure lit up some neurons! At its core, this hair technique is the same as what I use to make tentacular horrors! Just in this case, instead of using a round tentacle cross section, I needed to use a lumpy lock of hair cross section! Both of those characters in the first screenshot have hair that uses this cross-section (or something very similar to it). By applying this more complex bevel object to the curves that make up those ladies' hair, I was able to give each of them a whole head of styled hair with only about 10 curves. Here's what one of them looks like:
That is a single lock of hair, in isolation. To make this hair, I used the exact same technique that I used on the aforementioned tentacular horrors, except that my taper objects were really simple this time.
I ended up using two different tapers, since I wanted some of the hair locks to dwindle down to a point (mostly in the front of the head) but I wanted some of them to flair outwards again at the end, so that I could make those little flippy bits at the back of the head (I think that my utter lack of hair style awareness is probably showing now...).
With my bevel and taper objects created, it was really easy for me to make some curves (this time, I used nurbs curves since I had to make them conform to the ladies' heads) for the various locks of hair. Here is one of those curves, the main one that makes the hair that covers the front of her forehead, As you can see, I've got a few vertices on the nurbs path that I've positioned, and Blender takes care of figuring out the smooth curve and all of the little details, just like with subdivision surface modelling =)
So, after I got one hair clump in place, I moved on and made another and another, until I had a whole unusable mess of curves in a single object! This obviously works, but it's not the easiest thing in the world to work with as it gets really confusing to figure out which lines correspond with which curve. Fortunately, you can just select them all and press P to separate them out into individual objects, so it's not that big of a deal. When I made the Axe-Wielder, I just made a single clump in the object and then copy-pasted it a bunch of times, which worked fine, too.
Either way, I'm really happy with how this hair turned out! This technique for hair creation was really easy to manage and made hair that printed really well. I'll definitely be using this trick moving forward!
Hair can be another matter though. I've read/watched a lot of hair tutorials and there seem to be a few different techniques that are popular.
The first is really only useful to visual artists, which is to use the Particle system in Blender to make the hair. This works great for rendering things on screen because you can make thousands of hairs and then style them as needed, but it doesn't work too well for 3D printing. I have used versions of this technique (such as for the feathers on my Vermling Shaman's cape), but I've not found it useful for hair.
The next technique that I've seen a lot of people use is to model the hair through normal geometry. This is typically done through either cube extrusion or through sculpting, and if you've got solid artistic chops, I think this is an excellent option. This is the approach that I've used in the past, but I've never been really happy with the results that I've been able to achieve with sculpted hair.
The last technique uses a bunch of bezier curves to define the shapes of the hair. If you know me, you can probably already tell that this is my favorite ;) I actually watched a video about this technique many months ago, when I was first working with bezier curves on my Giant Viper model, but at that point I was just looking for general pointers for how to use curves and so pretty much forgot the details. A couple of weeks ago (since I've been on this mission to improve my face modelling skills), I was watching one of YanSculpts's videos on face sculpting... and about an hour and five minutes into it, he began using this technique to make the character's hair!
Watching him work sure lit up some neurons! At its core, this hair technique is the same as what I use to make tentacular horrors! Just in this case, instead of using a round tentacle cross section, I needed to use a lumpy lock of hair cross section! Both of those characters in the first screenshot have hair that uses this cross-section (or something very similar to it). By applying this more complex bevel object to the curves that make up those ladies' hair, I was able to give each of them a whole head of styled hair with only about 10 curves. Here's what one of them looks like:
I ended up using two different tapers, since I wanted some of the hair locks to dwindle down to a point (mostly in the front of the head) but I wanted some of them to flair outwards again at the end, so that I could make those little flippy bits at the back of the head (I think that my utter lack of hair style awareness is probably showing now...).
With my bevel and taper objects created, it was really easy for me to make some curves (this time, I used nurbs curves since I had to make them conform to the ladies' heads) for the various locks of hair. Here is one of those curves, the main one that makes the hair that covers the front of her forehead, As you can see, I've got a few vertices on the nurbs path that I've positioned, and Blender takes care of figuring out the smooth curve and all of the little details, just like with subdivision surface modelling =)
So, after I got one hair clump in place, I moved on and made another and another, until I had a whole unusable mess of curves in a single object! This obviously works, but it's not the easiest thing in the world to work with as it gets really confusing to figure out which lines correspond with which curve. Fortunately, you can just select them all and press P to separate them out into individual objects, so it's not that big of a deal. When I made the Axe-Wielder, I just made a single clump in the object and then copy-pasted it a bunch of times, which worked fine, too.Either way, I'm really happy with how this hair turned out! This technique for hair creation was really easy to manage and made hair that printed really well. I'll definitely be using this trick moving forward!
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