Sculpting the Hair

 11-13/10/21 - Week 2

To start off this week I mainly focused on sculpting the hair. To start off I made my base hair mesh much more comprehendible and accurate to what I wanted, I felt this would help me to get better looking hair.

I then wanted to do a bit of research on stylised hair since I felt my approach last year turned out looking not as good as I wanted it to. I found that most stylised artist use a brush that created geometry that was shaped like hair - more thin towards the end and had the gravity of the hair being attached to the head. These are used much like the curvetube brush that is already in zbrush but the aspect of the tapered brush makes it much easier and quicker to create a hair-like effect.

I used a couple of tutorials to work this out and ended up using this brush: https://academy.artheroes.co/imm-brush-for-stylized-hair?fbclid=IwAR3ixwYVenxh4vHiuJyM4LIRBJe32NYJPbjIi-Sxxj5g9tZGUixWULrU4Jo

Full credit goes to Art Heros and the creator of the brush who I was unable to find the source of though the tutorial was created by Marlon R. Nuñez so it's possible it's his brush.

I started to add in the hair strands, at first I found this a bit fiddly but eventually I managed to work out how to make things smooth and cover more of the area. I also used the move tool to manipulate some of the strand more to get it too look more how I wanted it to.

The hair ended up taking me much longer than I thought and the process was overall rather long winded. I think I am happy with the outcome, I think it looks stylised enough and enough like my design and draw over for me to be happy with. I want to get a bit of feedback on this however as I'm not sure if the hair is a bit too thick and needs some more refinement - one way to add some more detail to it is obviously by adding some smaller strands. I am unsure of how to do this specifically as obviously this will be needed to be done with planes to not have a high poly count after retopping. I don't know whether this is a case of adding those in now or later on in the process and how to bake these so they look good. I feel that having some feedback and insight would be really helpful here.

Now the hair is done I need to swiftly move on to clothing which I am looking forward to though I know there is still a lot of work for me to do.