Create Stylized Hair - Blender 3

In this video i'll be showing you how you can make stylized hair like this, if you want to know how to sculpt this character, then do check out the previous episodes in this playlist and look out for subsequent episodes. Where i talk about texturing and lighting, if you like what i do then do check out the playlist on this channel and my website for more great content. So the first thing you'll want to do is: do some research about the hair you want to mimic. This is essential and it's the step that most beginners miss because they feel like they've, seen enough hair and don't need to worry. I tend to gravitate towards pinterest for research. It'S a really good site because, as soon as you click on one image, it takes you to related images. Let'S take this one, for example, if i click on this scroll down a bit, then i've got lots of hairstyles that may be similar or not, but there are images that relate to that one. Once you've got a hairstyle that you like. Let'S say it's this one, for example, you need to take a good look at it and break it down into its simplest forms. You don't have to do exactly what i'm doing, but it could help you, but what you'll need to visualize is the big shapes, and this can be really rough you're, just trying to get an outline of the big areas of hair and the way they flow in Some way, so you can see me kind of separating it out slightly and figuring out the big shapes and that's the really basic outline you need to think about and follow. So those are the big shapes after the big shapes. You have the smaller details. So there's one going across there there's a little bit of sort of fluffy bits up here, but you could probably minimize that by having these sort of shapes come off like this. Maybe one down here and there's sort of a little one around here and there's kind of one down there as well and so forth. So we're going to do exactly that in blender. We'Re going to do the big shapes first and we'll do that with one or two objects, depending on your preference and then we'll use curves for these smaller shapes in green. So here i am in blender with a hairless model. Now, lighting and texturing is an important part of the overall look and i'll do separate tutorials on those. Let me know if you're keen for that, in the comments that will help me to know how many people are actually interested, so i'll go back to solid mode and we need a big shape for the hair. To start with so shift a to add mesh and then something like an icosphere or uv sphere. It doesn't make too much difference i'll scale that down so it's nice and small, so it fits our character and line it up do remember to do this in both front view and side view, and it doesn't matter if it's overlapping loads like this. It'S absolutely fine. Okay, so that's a good start just make sure that you've reset the scale. So you don't get any anomalies before going across the sculpting, so ctrl a and scale into sculpting, now i'll start off using the grab brush and it's a good idea to enable symmetry. When you start off we'll change that later on, obviously, but it just makes it quicker at the start, remember it's f to resize your brush and hold down shift if you want to smooth things out, but you shouldn't really have to at this stage. So i'm just using the sphere to get the overall shape of the whole of the hair, so not thinking about the individual areas just yet and i'm loosely basing it on the image that we looked at earlier, we're getting a lot of stretching now. So i need to do a remesh so shift r to look at the voxel size. Let'S bring that down to somewhere around here and the voxel size is the size of your faces that it's going to remesh to so don't look at the number i'm using look at the size of the squares, nice and big still so our smooth brush and our Other brushes will still have a strong effect and then control r to do the remesh and now, with those added faces, i can again try and get that big shape that i'm looking for. You may also want to use the smooth brush now as well, so hold down shift for that. Do make sure you're. Looking at your reference images a lot, and you should have one in particular you're trying to mimic and when you've got the rough overall shape. You'Ll want to turn off symmetry and then start concentrating on things like where the hairline is that's how big the forehead is and thinking about things like where the hair crosses the face or the eyes or things like that, every now and again, ctrl r. To do a remesh just so you've got less stretching, so i'm having one side kind of overlapping the eye very slightly and on the other side, just a tiny bit of overlap over the ear. It'S a bit big at the top, but you can exaggerate that sort of thing with stylized hair and we're roughly there with the very big shape. So we can do a bit of a finer remesh, so shift r just bring it in a little bit further and again you're looking at the voxel size, not the number, because your head might be a different size than mine and then ctrl r to remesh. Now, at this point, i like to use the crease brush to start creasing in the flow of the hair, so i'll come in and you'll want your brush a similar size to mine and i'll come in here and create a middle parting for my character. They'Re, usually a little bit sort of wavy, so you might want to add a bit of wave like this. Don'T worry if it digs into your mesh, you can just hold down control and pull it out in certain areas. Then we can start creasing up these areas. Holding down control, if you need to, if you want to pull it out and digging in with the normal brush. So every now and again hold down control to pull out an area of hair and give it some flow and then dig in in other places. And i'm being fairly random here. Obviously, you want sort of sharper lines in certain areas like this and to dig in with others, and already we've got something that looks okay, you might want to go back to the grab brush. If you need to kind of move areas around now, you've got to find a remesh. You can sort of sort out the ends of the hair to square them off a little bit more, but again it depends on the style just creating a bit of a space. At the back, so it's not just digging into our mesh and i might go into local mode for that. So i can move all this backwards out of the way local mode is forward, slash on your numpad or you can go to the view. Menu, quick, remesh sort out the stretching got a little too far now so come back a little bit: okay and a quick remesh. So that's looking okay! I think we need a bit more style, though so i'm going to pull this down and across this way, and so it's coming over the shoulder a little bit more okay, another quick remesh and we're certainly getting there okay. Now we can go a lot fine with our image, so shift r bring this voxel size right down and in fact, it's easier to type in at this point. So we know it's 0.006, so we'll take that down to 3 instead and do a remesh see what that looks like wanted a bit finer than that. So let's go down to 2. I think we're getting there now, let's just smooth that out a little bit and back to our crease brush and just naturally find some creases, where there's sort of lumps and bumps remember hold down control with the crease brush to make a sharp edge at the base Of the hair, you might want it kind of sharp or you can have it rounded. It depends on your preference and the style you're going for and generally here, i'm just making sort of long waves of hair by either holding down control with a crease brush to pull it out or just using it normally to dig it in and just go around Fairly, randomly creating these waves remember also to keep smoothing out by holding down shift okay. So it's not looking too bad at the moment. I'Ve got my statistics up here to find your statistics go into the overlays and tick on statistics. We'Ve got a hundred thousand faces at the moment, so that's pretty low. We could do another remesh and then smooth it out, get rid of some of the bobby bits if you wanted to or when i go back into layout mode, and i right click and shade smooth. You can't really see many of them anyway, so we're probably okay. Okay, so with our image, it's a little bit similar, but it's not exactly the same, and now we want to add the fine, detailed hair. So the bits in green that you can see here and that will really help the hair look a bit more dynamic and interesting. So if i come across the side here and show you the technique, we'll use curves for this, so shift right. Click to move. My 3d cursor shift a to add curve and then just a normal path is fine. I scale that right down. It can also be a bezier curve if you prefer working with the sort of bezier handles and things like that. Most beginners prefer a path they're. A little easier to control when you're in edit mode moving around the points. Okay, so i've got my path, but i need to add some thickness and for that we add another curve, i'll go to front view for this, so we can see it more easily and i press shift a to add curve and then circle i'll scale that right Down and rotate it around the x axis 90 degrees, so we can see it and just move it off to the side. I'M going to use this circle to control this hair strand's thickness and therefore shape i'll just turn this. So it's upright so r 90 and just move it next to our circle and to give this this shape, make sure it's selected go to the curve properties down here and it's under geometry scroll down a bit and where it says bevel. We change that to object. If i keep it on round, you can change the depth of the bevel like this, and you can see it creates a circle. Let'S just move it into the middle there, it's a little bit dull and we haven't got any control over the shape, except how wide it is like this. If we go to object instead and choose the circle now, it's mapping to this circle and if i click on the circle go into edit mode, i can start moving areas around and you'll see. My curve, therefore changes so i'll undo that for now and what i'll do is scale, this point down so select the middle point. Not the bezier handles either side, and then you can press s to scale it down. Scaling them closer makes them into a bit of a sharp point, and this what i mean by handles you can grab these handles and twist them and you do get more control but they're a little bit more awkward to use. Let'S grab this one g then said and move it upwards, and we can create a sort of interesting curve like this. These two as well make sure you've only got the points and not the ends of the handles and let's scale, those in the z and we can make them into more of a point something a bit more like this. That'S the classic sort of stylized look and when i look at my curve, it's got that look and feel now. However, it's very thin at the moment before changing the thickness, let's go into object mode and apply the scale to this object, so it doesn't act strangely. In any way - and we can see that the scale is actually uniform, but let's set it to one anyway, so ctrl a and scale and i'll do the same for the circle, although that's already one, so it doesn't make any difference. So, let's change the thickness of our hair by going to our hair object or the path and go into edit mode, i can select my vertices and press alt s to scale them up and i can do them individually. So the end one. For example, i can press alt s and then zero to make it go to a point, and i can now start moving these around and making them look all cool i'll scale this one down as well. These are a bit thick, so alt s and that's looking good i'll, go into object mode and move this into position so rx180 to move it upside down. And let's move this to the front of our object, it can be really helpful to start off in front view and then go to side view and switch between the two to position it to start with and then kind of free form it. After that, you can use proportional edits as well, so this button here will have a circle of influence. It'S a bit like sculpting then, and you can pull these around and make them look quite interesting. This one i'll alt s and bring it right down now comes the fun bit of the positioning and put it around into place and experiment with how you want your hair to look and just remember, alt s for any points. You want to scale round to side view same sort of thing, but move it into position. There'S one more thing you can do, which is quite interesting and that's with one point: you can press ctrl t to tilt it and that can be quite fun as well. So selecting points and ctrl t tilts them around and you can make it all wavy and curly, and we've got some interesting, looking hair there. If i want to, i can extend these so e to extrude and extend it out, and then we can have some sort of interesting. Curls. You'Ve also got your radius written over here as well for your different points. If you need to be more precise when scaling so the alt s command is the radius once you've got one in place, we can just copy that so shift d and move it into a new position. You might want to right. Click set your origin to geometry. So your pivot point, when you're rotating is in the middle a bit more. The major difficulty can often be positioning in both front view and side view and trying to get it in the right place in 3d, but you soon get used to it in terms of where they start. This one would look better starting from this point here, where there's sort of a natural indentation so i'll bring that one up to that area there and maybe twist it into position with ctrl t. Okay, so we've got two in place and then you can start thinking about the different sizes. So if i duplicate this one move it into position, i can make it a lot smaller by just scaling these points down together. Remember it's alt s and just s normally for scaling normally and once again move it into a different position. Do look at the reference to see where the hair flow might go, but it's a lot of experimentation most of the time, if you ever think you don't need a point, you can press ctrl x to dissolve it. So i'm speeding this footage up about 10 times and you can see the sort of workflow that i'm using generally i'm trying to kind of stick them into dents and kind of have them come out as curls. I find that is more natural. The way it sort of flows out from an area try and vary it a fair bit and they don't always have to sort of curl outwards away from the hair. They can kind of curve inwards as well towards the face, and you can kind of have clumps of hair sticking out like this as well. The hardest bit is trying to kind of integrate it with the hair, so you might want to occasionally go across to rendered mode to see what it looks like with your lighting, and i will talk about lighting setup and texturing in later. Episodes lighting is absolutely essential for making something look good, so make sure you look out for that particular video coming soon. You can also take two points: right click and subdivide between the two, i'm not doing much with the back of the hair. I'M not really going to see that bit on my character and it makes it a little bit quicker to model and it's looking kind of fun. You can always go back at this point and tidy up the base mesh as well. If you want to, you could even do a finer remesh i felt i didn't need to, and i was just adding a few more creases and crevices in and there we have it our finished hair for our character. Let me know how you're getting on and whether you're finding these interesting and if you have any questions, then let me know and look out for the episodes on lighting and then texturing thanks for watching and i'll see you next time.