Why I Ditched Zbrush For Blender For Hair
- Posted on 16 October, 2018
- 6D Hair Extensions
- By Anonymous
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Hello, boys and girls, my name is Danny Mac and in this video, I'm gon na show you an alternative approach to creating polygons her. So if you've seen any of my other videos on her, you know that I can't pronounce it properly. No hang on a minute. So if you seen any of my time lapses, our live streams are her tutorials, basically, most of the characters I've ever put out there have her med in a particular we're using ZBrush. The way it works in ZBrush is that you have a her brush with predefined. Her strand shapes, then you make all your stroke settings such as size, taper, etc. Then you position your strands. How you want them recently. Zbrush made this more versatile by adding better curve control such as elastic and liquid. Also, the defamation menu gives you further options to control the hers, such as Bend curve, which allows you to control the hairs using points and the twist function can be nice to use too. The problem with this approach in ZBrush is that its destructive so, for example, to use the defamation options. The hers need to be in a straight line to work properly, meaning once the hers are in position, they're no longer an option. This also means that, once the curve is accepted, it becomes very difficult to make big changes in the position of the strands without redoing it off from scratch, and it's also very difficult to adjust the taper. Our add twists, which better address once the hers are in position rather than beforehand. Finally, because this is a predefined insert mesh brush, it's not very easy to redefine the ship along the curve. Nor is it easy to reduce the poly count on the curve for optimization. In this video we're going to see how blender can fix all of these problems - and I want to thank fellow youtuber, Zacharias, Reinhardt and hope I pronounced that properly. I apologize, if I didn't, and for introducing me to an alternative technique in one of his videos know what I'm about to demonstrate is by no means revolutionary. In fact, it's a very, very basic modeling and it's actually one of the first things I ever learned how to do, but I just somehow never thought to approach modeling her in this way. First I'll very quickly go over the basics of doing this manually. Then I'll show you a neat little plugin that speeds up the process a little so I'll do shift air to add a Bezier curve. Then I'll do shift air again and add a circle. Now, with the Bezier curve selected I'll come over to the curve options and make the circle my bevel object, the circle is now basically extruded along the curve and we can cut it off by checking fill caps. Now the beauty of this technique is that not only can we know position this curve, however, we won and the points always follow the share. If we tap into edit mode, we can reshape a new object on the fly. Now that's the basic thing you can probably already have an idea of where this is going now I'll get rid of that and I'll show you what the bevel curve tools plug-in does and, of course, there's a link to the plugin in the description. So what I'll do is press new beveled curve and we get this it's basically what we had before, except the ship is different and there's a taper to it and before I click anything, I'm gon na change these attributes. So first I'm gon na change the shape to square, although it doesn't really matter what you set this to, because we're gon na change this in a moment anyway, I'll check you subsurf modifier, which does exactly what you'd expect it to it adds the modifier to the Object and I'll change the radius fall-off to not tip this gets rid of the taper. You might expect I'd once a key, but we're gon na have a much better control over the taper. In just a moment, you could mess around with a scale if you want, but again we'll get to that shortly. Once we click away. We just have these options up here and the first one I want to draw your attention to is a edit bevel which basically jumps us into edit mode, so we can adjust the shape of a bubble, object, here's where I'll start shaping the her and I'll just Turn on wireframe on our objects, or we can see it better now. This already gives us much more versatility over the old method because, with the ZBrush method, once the hair was down, it was very difficult to change it, but it gets better because if I press two points and press W followed by subdivide, we can change the shape. Even more and of course, this means, I can also delete points which is incredibly useful for reining in the polycomb, which again is not easy task using the ZBrush method. Alt or not. Is that when I do that the cap topology updates on the fly, which is also great another way we can wrangle? The polycomb is by hopping out of edit mode and simply dropping down the? U subdivisions which again can be edited at any time. So now we have our share but we're missing that all-important taper. So let's bring that back. Press shift, err and add a new Bezier curve and press 7 on the numpad to look at it from a top view. I'M moving up in object mode, so we can see it now. Basically, what you're looking at is the stroke curve that you would find in ZBrush that I used to create a taper on the her brush and I'll. Show you what I mean if I select the bevel curve and click this eyedropper next to set the object followed by our new curve. Can you see what's happening the higher up the y-axis? The curve is the thicker. Our object is so we find jump into edit mode on this curve and move the left handle up. We start to get the nice taper we're looking for, and hopefully you can see just how powerful it is to be able to control this on the fly, because this can be tweets even after the her is placed on the head. So we now have on the fly controls for the taper in share. Obviously, we just need to jump into edit mode on the curve and start place and get on the head, which again is super nice, because once we have our basic placement again, we can subdivide the points insert tweaking the shape even more. Alternatively, you could just select a point in hit e to extrude a new one. Now one of my favorite parts of this method is, if you wanted to add a twist to the strands. Well, that's super easy, just hop into edit mode and select a point followed by a ctrl T and look at that easy-peasy twisting. Another great thing is that if I now hit shift D to duplicate it's going to duplicate along with a new bevel object, which means we can adjust the ship independently of our first mesh, which is great for adding variation. The taper object remains the seminole meaning a change will affect all of the strands. So if you wanted to change this behavior, you would have to add a new curve, but I personally think this is unnecessary anyway, once you're finished, if you want to turn the hers into meshes, simply select them and click convert to meshes, and this will conveniently cleanup The bevel objects for you as well. I wouldn't do this until you're completely happy with the positioning knob, because you'll lose all of your controls. When you do this and if it looks like you've just created a bunch of angles, don't worry just turn on draw all edges and you'll see that all of the polygons are in fact intact. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please hit the thumbs up button and, if you'd like to see more, don't forget to subscribe and hit the little bell to be notified of my next video peace. Now, with the Bezier curve selected I'll come over to the curve options and make the circle my bevel object.
Comments
CynicatPro: Quick bonus tip: While editing the curve, you van hit alt-s to scale that point. This is useful for tweaking the taper per strand. Hope this helps! =3 EDIT: Turns out taper object overrides the taper, they don't stack sadly! =<
Scott Smithenstein: I can't believe I haven't found this sooner. My hair modeling workflow is completely revolutionized thanks to you!
Michael Fox: I like how you pronounce hair, "hurr"
Fuloqwam: What an awesome add-on! I wonder why I bothered learning Maya when Blender seems to be so versatile.
Javier Cortes: This was wonderful!!! I use C4D instead of Blender but there is a tool in there that does the same thing and I was able to follow along.
Jifka: I just started using Blender last year and finally got over the learning curve and love it to pieces. I'm planning on re-doing some animation work I did years ago, but now with modern tools. When I bumped into your channel, I immediately enjoyed the sculpting bits, but really hoped you'd have more on rigging. I speak for myself, but I'd definitely pay for a whole rigging course from soup to nuts if you ever put one together.
TuxedoTara: I'm a newbie at blender and this is completely different than any tutorial I've seen on how to do hair! I'm excited to try this, so far hair has been the cause of so much frustration for me and this looks like it might be easier to control than manipulating planes.
Artistry Artistry: Zbrush has some glaring limitations I hope they'll fix sometime soon. Almost everything in Zbrush is destructive, and layer management is horrendous.
MaadMike: This tutorial was the final push for me to start learning Blender. I am primarily Maya and Zbrush user, but I heard so much good things about it that I couldn't continue to ignore Blender
Derick Wong Friedrich: Zbrush's control seem pretty limiting. Nice to see a more traditional workflow in Blender like this being more productive! This is what people have been doing for decades in Maya and Max before Zbrush was a viable option :)
Lulz z: Hello Danny, I've been watching your videos and loving them for over 2 years now and I would be very interested in watching a detailed tutorial on how you do your render passes in Zbrush/Photoshop. I was wondering if you have any tutorial that I can buy on that? Thank you for everything you teach us!
malcolm341: Great video Danny, the extrude on curve looks super powerful in Blender, wish we had something more non-destructive in Maya.
elfoxy: Nice tutorial, thanks Danny. Been meaning to use this for a while and finally got around to it. Twisting the hair curve is super satisfying imo
Prince Westerburg: I watched this a week ago and it might as well have been in Dutch. After a week on Blender I'm creating my own stuff and this is a basic tutorial - Awesome software!
Sean M: Quick note - make sure you add the new Bezier Curve/ taper object while in object mode, not edit mode.
Dan Skizz: I think layers are your friend when you want to make adjustments to the hair. Pab gave an interesting lecture on the subject during the last Zsummit., you basically record all the definitions on separate layers and then you can mix the effects. I've only just thought about this now and haven't tested it yet but it could be an option...
Mr Dan INSANE: This is amazing, thank you for the great video tutorial. I wonder how would you create Dreadlocks, since they're not smooth on the curve but different size shaped... any chance you'll make a tutorial for this? keep up the good work! :)
Eylone Muskson: This is just like _Extrude Along Curve_ in Maya, using NURBs curves. Very useful and thoroughly underrated!! Keep it up mate, she's looking incredible!
Breana Melvin: Great tutorial! I had no trouble following in when I tried this out last weekend, but as of this weekend when I tried to use 'Edit Bevel' within the Bevel Curve Tool, I suddenly can't; there are no visible points to move around, whether it be on new curves or old curves that I formally was able to successfully edit. I have a feeling that I've somehow turned off the visibility of these, but I can't figure out how to turn them back on. I thought it was just a matter of toggling 'Hide Bevel Objects' since the little eye icon next to it is closed, but when I click it nothing happens at all (and the eye icon remains closed). I've even tried reinstalling the add-on, but no luck. Google has failed me at this point, so here's hoping that perhaps you've ran into this problem yourself and know the solution?
Joel Walden: A superb video -- one of the most helpful I've seen in a while! Well done and thank you!
holyshaman35: thank you for the tips. tried them a little for my self then thought what if i need separated strands on one curve? my answer to that was to instead of making one big shape for the hair form, i made 5 smaller pieces on the same circle curve. simple duplicate and reshape.
Starseeker Spixel: Hey Danny, this was so helpful thank you for sharing, how would I approach shorter hair (say like an asymetric cut) which also has long parts like in this video? Do you have any recommendations for tutorials regarding this?
Ar7ific1al: I've been very reluctant to use Blender for several years. I simply don't like the UI or how it operates, as I've been using Maya for a good while and am used to it. It's also incredibly frustrating to get used to a piece of software while working on something, and I don't feel like taking the time to tinker around in Blender to learn how to use it when I'm already familiar and efficient with Maya. But every once in a while I find something somewhere that makes Blender very attractive. This is one such thing. I've been looking for good solutions to hair in ZBrush for a couple months now and haven't been able to find anything that works for me. This seems to be very useful and more user friendly than, say, exporting fibermesh curves to Maya, or using premade hair curve/imm brushes, or using the bend deformer you demonstrated in the video. (I used the latter for a recent project, and it was kind of a pain in the ass but it got the job done.) I obviously don't know a whole lot about Blender, so I have to ask: Is there a way I can use the curves from this to then rig the hair? That is to say, can I create a joint chain from the curve. I tried to find a solution to that for Maya but came up empty handed. It seems like everything I wish Maya could do, Blender can. So is using a curve to create a joint chain possible in Blender? If it is, Blender will likely become part of my workflow.
Lucky & The Divine : I already made a similar setup for making my hair - not the same but am impressed with their detail ;3
Staredown Games: I've always wondered how hair was done! The more you know...Thanks for sharing!
Robin: i dont make 3d models so i dont understand in detail much of whats going on this video but its pretty cool and i can see how the blender method is way better and more versatile
Stephanie Monster: I am wishing for the day they allow particle hair to be made into mesh. That is without tons of little unconnected vertices.
Cranberri Arts: Hello Danny Mac! Thank you so much for these tutorials, they've really helped me improve my character design workflow. In one of your previous videos, I think you mentioned that you did most of your texturing in Substance Painter. Out of curiosity, I was wondering if you had thought about doing a speedrun of your texturing process in Substance? Like a run similar to what you are currently doing with your character speed sculpts with the full footage on Gumroad. Just thought I'd throw a suggestion in! Hope you are doing well, can't wait for your next video!
Gorgoth24: Using edit mode to place the curve can make it act unpredictably. You can fix this by adding and editing a lattice modifier. This makes placing the curve act more predictably overall and prevents that HUGE ballooning effect you can sometimes get when curving/twisting the object.
Marcos Socram: Hey there! New to the channel. And guess as everyone else you hooked me with the accent ^_^ Was passing by while trying to learn how to make polygon "hurr" :) then decided to leave a tip as a thank you: you can assign a new bezier curve to each "strand" as taper object, making them even more individualistic in control. Also, transforms in object mode on the taper curves don't affect the main curve, only in edit mode
Catotoro: Thank you! This was very helpful and is going to save me a bunch of time (:
Gatz 3D: This is amazing! So powerful!! Thank you for sharing this plugin! Excellent video!
Samuel Stone: Amazing tutorial it will help me out greatly. Thanks!!
Jlinus: Question. If you export this model back into maya does it come out weird? I always have problems sculpting in zbrush or blender and then exporting back into maya. I want to animate my models so I really need to be able to export it correctly
jean roger: that's a great idea! I always have problems with hair mod in Zbrush. I will now do it like that but with cinema 4d
R S: the point is blender sculpt can't really handle millions of polygon this is the only drawback maybe for me of blender sculpt the rest is great. I hope blender will also improve the functionality of blender sculpt and uv.
Sedghammer: Well this is great, but the same thing can be done in Zbrush with curves and falloffs.
Kenixan2: i wish they would update the sculpt tools for blender, then we wouldn't need zbrush anymore lel
aliina Boricua: this is amazing, i was looking like crazy for a good tutorial!!! thank you!!
Daniel: Already knew about this method, but I didn't know about the plugin so still learned something. Thanks for sharing.
Marek Moravec: Great video! Quick and to the point. Thank you!
Citizen 337: Huge puzzle piece for me - thanks for saving me a lot of time!
James Prakash J.C.: Awesome, I really can't understand that out of all the 61k subscribers only 4k wanna watch this awesome content. Really, they are missing out.
Sas van Gulik: Now its time to do it in HOUDINI Semi-simulated strands with parameters Full on scriptable procedural twisting Automatic generation of different extrusion shapes for herr clumps Introducing a slight bits of randomness in the curve shapes All can easily be done in just a few clicks and 500+ years of watching tutorials! (No but seriously, if you like the customisability that blender has to offer, check out the amazing felexibility that Houdini offers, you can use a full-fledged, fully featured version for free WITH! mesh export so you can actually use the herrs you make.)
animbot: So from what I've seen this method can be done in 3dMax, Maya, and Softimage (I assume most programs but those are the one's I personally know). I'm curious what's the reason you specifically chose blender?
starfingers: Thought things had been quiet from you, only to discover YouTube hasn't been informing me of your new stuff. Trying to catch up. Loved the rigging tutorials. Keep up the good work.
Atelier Morph: OMG THANKS, this is what I looking so much time!! Now you show me how to do this... I love this! Really Thank You!
Afeso Franklyn: I've been searching for was to make hair the last week. Heck, I even put your name in one of my searches but only came up with the xgen video which isn't available for blender. Imagine my surprise opening YouTube and seeing you have a hair tutorial for blender. Thanks man.
Tlatotoctli: Choose wich blender pocess or addon for modeling hair is the hard part ,all of them are awesome!!
Liscar Scott: I was just getting accustomed to the zbrush method, then you had to go and ruin it. Next you're gonna tell me Blender has a sculptris pro mode too..... wait
Phillip J: Man that bevel curve tool is awesome and you explanation helped a lot
shamanik1320: Hey DM3D, since you got far more reach than I did you ever find out if the lecorche app on Google play will get fixed someday? It does look really helpful and I own it and had it installed on my phone but it updated with the broken software and now I dont have it at all. :( Or do you know some other great resources for bodies? I'm almost satisfied my knowledge of the face. Thank you!
Francesco di Buono: Another useful tip: if you switch to "face snapping" and check the "project individual elements" button (far right one) you can place each node on the surface of the head just by moving with "g" and holding ctrl. Projection is view-dependent, so you may want to rotate the viewport to match the angle. This way you don't need to manually place and adjust each node to make it tangent to the surface
BuzzKirill: Man, your subtle touches of humor are superb in these vids
Rob Frydryck: Very nice tutorial. It really added a new dimention to air modleing! ..kind of cool accent too.
Ismael Klepasky: Hello Danny, could you upload addon (Bevel curve) to download it? The page you have provided contains the incomplete addon. I love your channel; keep it up!
Gwyn Davies: Awesome workflow! Does anyone know how to use bevel Curve tools in blender 2.8?
L: Nice tutorial, too bad the addon is not currently compatible with 2.91, I know 2.91 has integrate bevel curves, but they are not as flexible as having a actual curve object driving the curve bevel. You can still add a custom curve object to drive your hair in 2.91, but this addon used to give a really streamlined solution that gives you more options, I wished they had inserted this system as the bevel that is now shipped in master.
Joshua Knight: I've been looking for this! Thank you so much. Found you accidentally from another video. I appreciate this a lot. You earn a subscribe!
Jacques Mains: Love how you made that passing joke about your pronounciation. Made me laugh :D Great video, very useful technique! Thanks alot!
Red Alchemy: Is there an easy way to consolidate the the mesh after you apply the modification? Something that will dynamically link up interpenetrating geometry making it cleaner to work with
Chris Cosby: In the future, would you explain your eyelash, eyebrow techniques? Thank you for the awesome help!
H Weffer: Hi Danny! what do you think about the sculpt in Blender? did you try it?
artkiko: that's brilliant! makes me excited to start doing hair. thank you :)
DarKSideF0X: Hello, just wondering how do you pose eyeballs to look left, up, right, down or ect? Love your vids BTW :)
klystron2010: You should also make a few male models with the Him tool.
sadicus: will "Bevel Curve Tools" work in Blender 2.8 or is there an updated tutorial? ~ Cheers!
Ghogiel3D: Works the same as max if you loft (as sweeps don't have proceedural twist controls by default). The difference is when you copy the hair piece the taper would be independent control but the profile shape would still reference the same spline shape Maya finally has sweep tools now so you can replicate proper sweep workflows there now. Which are quite good imo since you get most of the power of max's sweeps, with the proceedural modifiers like twist ect from lofts. Shame the spline/curve tools just aren't as good overall. But you can do a LOT with Maya curves now it has decent sweep tools.
equaldigits: I still prefer Maya for hair, but Maya is very poor for sculpting so Blender seems like a good option instead of having to using Maya + Zbrush.
Thunder Draws: "if you've seen any of my other videos on hör you know I can't pronounce it properly" lolll
Skillzor Skillsson: In my personal opinion its alot easier to make hair using Path Curve. I have tried both with Bezier Curve and Path Curve and i was not able to make anything decent with Bezier Curve but i could make something really great with Path Curve. So, since this is not an option in this addon i personally recomment to not use this addon. But this is ofcourse just my personal opinion and everyone may not agree. But i thought it could be useful to share my experience with creating polygon hair in Blender using Curves. And i have been using blender since 2011 so 8 years :)
vali fuller-quinn: Hi thanks for the great video. Does this work on the latest version and on iOS? I installed the add on but nothing happened. Thanks
Sinogy: This comment section is the proof that many blender lovers are completely unaware of 3D basics across all applications.
Matt MMM: 3ds also does this exceptionally well
DiogoX2: I think using path is much easier than using bezier
malook queen: Hello, you're job are so amazing and shinng keep do it and don't give up, and if you allowed to me can I ask you a question: what is the program you used to do that character 3D? And Thanks for you and your job,, and please answer me!! Thanks again!!
Zune HD: In the 2.8 beta, where can I find the bevel object at 2:40 or so?
shirley lam: Okay, say I created stylized hair in Zbrush using imm hair Tube brush. Is there a way to use GoB to import the hair or hairstyles I created in ZBrush back into the Blender software for animations etc? Or will my Zbrush stylized imm hair tube hair will not transfer?
GameExplorer: this is a standard feature in all 3D software since the civil war. :D
Phil Nolan: I notice there's no 3D-Coat on your taskbar. Ever tried it for sculpting? Hair or otherwise.
Эдуард Потерпеев: Oh! Nice method! Its remind me a 3DSMax's loft function, but its costs so much xD
Karl Müller: If I could give this 2 thumbs up I would! Thanks a lot! :D
Kristopher Hammes: Hey Danny do you still prefer this technique? :)
Killian Ekouma: Is the Bevel Curve Tool available for Blender 2.8 ?
SMA: Some nice features in Blender! Never thought I'd see the day! lol . Nice video mate!
Virginija Sileikiene: Nice tips. Thank you for sharing.
93desousa: Came for the title, stated for the Hurr, Heur, Har.
Warp: I don't think anyone in the comments section can get over the way you pronounce 'hurr'.
vazak11: Can I ask how you got that menu on the left side to come up? I cannot find it >< Great video though!
LeatherAndPoems CharmyMan: how can I deal with this curve method for 3D printing ? iI mean I am not experience in blender to create this kind of stylez workflow for hair...but I noticed it is very very useful...however...I tryed to put branck of curves in my character and I ve some problems with the tapper of the mesh...I edit the curve a little to put the root of the hair near to the face of the model's head.... thx.
Ksepastremenos: May be a stupid question, but wouldn't it be easier (considering each model needs a substantial amount of strands) to use path curves, rather than bezier?
rhov233: Great, but calling hair "her" when there was a female depicted made this very confusing.
HypersonicMonkeyBrains: Replace the word hair with fur, and it would probably clear up the confusion.
Mariia Zatorska: I love your voice! and thanks for the great tutorials :)
Andrew Gelston: is here a way to put a plane rather than a cylindar along the curve? I have been wanting to do haircards in blender but cause i havent figured out how to do this method with plane (either one sideded or two) i have to use a custom IMM brush in zbrush and then bring that into blender and uv it, which is a nightmare ngl. any advice?
chan krishna: What is the material are you used in hair?
KRO: On your previous models don't the legs look too short? Or am I just wrong?
vazak11: Oh gosh this was so good, thanks!
Jeef Berky: You're a life saver my man
PandoraWolf: Am i one of the few that finds this accent charming? Great video btw, it helped me allot learning more about blender.