Cinema 4D Hair - Learn How To Grow And Control Hair In Cinema 4D

Today'S tutorial is all about adding hair and using brushes inside of cinema 4d. Let'S go hey everybody its Nick here yet from grayscale guerrilla comm, bringing you the tools, training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now. Today'S video is recorded during ask GSG, which is where artists and designers just like you can bring you. Our cinema, 40 questions live to us and we try to answer them, live on our twitch channel. So if you'd like to get more info about ask us g and learn where you can't ask your cinema 4d questions link it up down below, I'm also going to link it up here in YouTube. Also, if you've missed past seasons and episodes of asks us G, we also have those available on our training site, we're going to link that down below as well if you're interested alright. Today'S video is all about playing with hair and brushes. In fact, the brushes panel I've rarely used and Chris actually opens it up. We start to learn what we could do to manipulate hair and in fact, what we build is a kind of a hay-bale look out of these hair and brushes. So, let's, let's stop talking about it! Let'S go ahead right on in to cinema 4d and let's see how we tackle this question, everybody welcome to another ask GSG today. It'S me and Chris we're in the chat room here and we're trying to answer questions in the chat room like this one from rod. Let'S go check it out rods been asking some great questions. You may have seen him in other. Ask GHGs um. He linked to this uh. This render from faux real or for real for you, I'm gon na go for real. I think he just kind of blend them together. I'Ve seen their work around a lot. Did they do some really cool stuff, really cool? Looking yeah come check this this whole page out and and give them a give them a follow to their works. Really cool um rods, specifically asking about this kind of hay-bale style. Look with what like rope going around it little plastic thing: it just got a lot of little detail to it and um, but it also might be something you know with kind of like one one texture that we could focus on in one kind of spot. So, let's uh, you ready yeah we're focus the hey. Well, this whole thing might dead-end we're making this up as we go yeah. So we we actually, we actually are not exactly sure how this is Mabel, but we're gon na we're gon na do our best to figure it out. So, let's head on in a cinema goin on and do it well. First of all, let's decide the primitive, but I think that right away, you should get this thing lit like get the primitive lit and then based on that now we can start and make the hair the hair we're gon na try and tackle this with hair. Oh try and make that look more real, but we should have the basis of lighting, so what primitives should be kind of based off of generically we're doing for going for weird shapes I like going for the Platonic yeah and then tinkering with the different primitives. You get the cool like dodecahedron that one's neat, five-sided yeah, I say pick, I say pick one you want now. This is gon na be a little tough, because I think hair is a different thing to render and light very much, then a primitive. But I get your idea like: let's get some lights in the scene, so we're not fighting against, especially if you going to tackle this thing with hair, so we're not gon na fight against it. You know so: okay, there's our size, there's our approximate color and yeah. I think it looks sexy so knowing that we're gon na work - or I guess I should ask you you - you talked a little bit about maybe doing this with hair. Is that your first tackle? Are you gon na get a geometry? It'S it's! It'S gon na be we're gon na use, hair and then put geometry on the hair, so we'll place it using hair, but then actual actually render real geometry. Okay, so it so. I would actually tackle this slightly differently if, if you're going to use hair or geometry, so I'm going to set it up, I'm going to set it up for um for kind of hair a little but mostly geometry, and I'm also going to set up a camera. So we're kind of facing the way, the same direction, sure all the time. So here's our camera, I'm going to just zoom in a little bit, not that much there we go and our first light is going to be um now, probably out front. And it's going to be kind of this up into the up into the right light and you can um probably want to use area lights, although I think we're going to go in for an another round of lighting. So I'm going to try to keep this fast, rendering for you, Chris, so like soft shadows or that can get swapped later to be airy or something yeah. And then I would say it's a global light for the rest of it. So it's very bright scene right. So I want to take a global light, just kind of give it a general light over the whole scene, like 50 or 60 percent, and that's going to be everything and then I just want to see a little bit um when you get that detail in there. It'S also going to have a lot to do with ambient occlusion. So just so, we are just so we're clear, like once. We get all those little strands going. We'Re gon na need little contact shadows between every one, so that would be like kind of my super base. Lighting that's going to render really quick and then I think I would go in later and maybe replace this with a softbox or something. But I think this will be the fast way to start sure. You want a background here, so we're not rendering on black yeah. So we can. We can kind of put our own little gradient back there if we grab a background background and create a new material. One day we got ta do some of the foreground. It gets no love foreground. What would you use a foreground for like a lower third or something? I guess I guess After Effects is always my foreground element. You know like that's how addicts is your foreground right? So we can add a gradient here: uh and the gradients actually have like a diagonal gradient and we could just kind of put some some fun kind of colors in here. Sometimes I'm stuck with this like orange to pink kind of thing all right. It'S kind of your deal, I dig it that's good. It always looks nice, it's kind of like pale orange too pink. Look! So there you go so now we have our basic look um. You know we'll switch some colors around as we go. In fact, I'm even just going to take your thing and make it a little bit more abstract, um color wise. Just we could focus on that. I think you could still do the hey, but then that way, it's it's a little bit different. You know sure that alright, alright, that's uh, that's my super basic set up. I think, and then we'll do a pass as soon as Chris. What is it do forward? It'S the fourth as soon as Chris has some more stuff to light, we'll tweak it, but there's always as Chris's same and stuff, it's always a back and forth between lighting and texturing and then making your object. If you think about it in in the real world, you know you're a lot of the times as a photographer. You already have the object in front of you and then, and then it's up to you to light that object to make it look good and really, in 3d, you're kind of working at everything at once: you're creating the object and lighting it and moving the camera Around so there's always going to be a lot of changes as those three things change. If Chris gave me this just finished um, it would be a lot different than you know doing this pre light sure this has an idea. Oh yeah, does I take these basics up like I can I can work towards the lighting and then once that Sun you can relight based on the geometry. So it's it's really just going back and forth and doing that over and over again I'm ready now we're gon na try and tackle this guy with hair. I just saved it, so we can screw it up and crash yeah. You want anything I'm going to go ahead and make this guy editable and we're going to start right away by throwing hair on this guy. Now, if we're going to get, if we're going to get really detailed - and we might want to do this - we might use some hair tools that I think most the time people don't end up playing with too much. So we're going to go to hair object, add hair and in force boom, there's hair. If we get render right now, there's going to be a bunch of hairs on it, not terribly exciting um. So, as far as I like to look here, we got. None of these are the same like if you look at this one, this one's kind of pushing off to the right. This one's got a swirl in it like this one's just kind of going left to right, like all spiky all over the place like every single one of these is completely different, so we'd. Actually, we can't just click a button and have this look like that? We'D have to do a lot of individual attention on these bits, so we got and so many decisions to make on this. First of all, first of all, we don't have anywhere near as many hairs as we need, so we can make like 10 times as many hairs, but we got keep in mind we're going to eventually make this geometry. So we got to keep in mind that you know once this is actually a bunch of polygons. It'S going to really slow us down. The hair render super quick but right, but the geometry will not right. Actually, the gem tree might render relatively quick, but it's going to run incredibly slowly. In addition to that, we have like how many segments we're going to need, which can become really important and then especial for this one is the length our object is relatively small, so I'm going to change our length down to something shorter like 50 and that's giving A shorter strand: now we could, if we were doing this with hair, we can go into the hair and right away, like maybe grab some hay like colors, which I'm just guessing here. Let'S go from kind of an ya yellow to maybe an orange, your yellow, and then I think, we'd pull way back on the specular or maybe get relatively shallow specular dull, yeah and then like we'd, have to pull our thickness way up and the thickness is maintained. Pretty much throughout so we could have these don't get thinner over time. We have them, get like a little thinner and then we got the overall scale like some of them are bigger. Some of them are smaller, so we can put like a lot of variation in here, so they can get bigger and smaller, and let's just take a look at that, this is gon na be very different than what we had a second ago. It'S very silver, nice um. So if you pull back on the global light, Chris you'll get more darkness on the shadows, maybe pull that back to 30, while you're tweaking stuff up and that that's really popping okay, there we go, but that's that's a lot closer there. But anyways you see, our thickness is a little better, but that's still wood nowhere near enough. So I'm going to jump that to be significantly thicker, we're overdoing it and now those if we were just approaching with hair, so you might be able to get some reasonable stuff going with here and from here you might think like okay, well, there's a lot of Variation like maybe we'll just throw some frizz on it, and actually you can probably get pretty far with something like I don't think clumping would do it, but um kink is. It might be a good one for this. Yeah kink is like kink and frizz are similar, but I think kink is closer to the base and then freezes more of the tips, but just by Fritzing, the up. It'S gon na give us a lot of variation. On top of the hair, but that's not feeling like hay at all, like that's not helping too much so honestly, where I start going from here is um, and actually we should approach this by adding a lot more guides right now. We only have a couple guides here and you see: we've made one guide per point. So if we set this to polygon area - and we start increasing the count going to start creating more and more and more hairs, if we subdivide this, if we subdivided this properly, it might actually be the best we'll get really clean distribution on this, so will be The best way to do that, maybe if we melt this whole guy or what's untrained you late and I'm going to set I'll set it slightly large and recreate end guns. So it's going to do it's going to melt away all just those triangles and now, if we subdivide hopefully this works pretty well we're going to do a regular subdivide. It'S going something like that and if we do this a couple times, because our base object doesn't matter like this geometry, isn't gon na be too big a deal so now I can subdivide that a couple times and I'm actually going to go ahead and remake the Hair object: you can also regrow that might actually work. I don't do that too often, but if we sorry that we get this tiny interface going on right now with our low resolution, but if we regrow they'll, actually that's like creating a new hair. No, so, instead of having to do that, we kept all of our settings, so we get a whole bunch of new ones, and now we can set this back to like polygon center and regrow, and now they should start appearing if we give them the proper count. I want to crank that way up and now you're going to get one for every spot, so that's actually working pretty well. So now what we might start tinkering with is the brush tools, which I don't think I don't think get used terribly often. I only had to use of one time on a project as what I think it really specific, but I've always thought it was a cool concept to have brushes for hair to move the hair around. But I've never had a great use for him yet um. But, like I feel like this is actually a really good example. We'Re not gon na have enough time to give this a lot of love because we're this quick live tutorial, but under simulate under hair tools, I tore off this menu and we get all these cool brush options. So I can do something like grab this brush. Oh and there's another important factor we want to on are our geometry: here, I'm going to throw a hair tag: hair, Collider and now we've made this geometry, a Collider body yep, and so now the hair shouldn't pass through it and I think it doesn't pass pass Through even as we're brushing, if we turn on collisions, I cool or that might I'm not understanding that I use this too infrequently that might be hair hair collisions, I'm not sure you should save this right here. I should totally save this right here. Well, okay, I'm gon na try and mess it up and see what happens? I'M gon na just brush weight right through and look it is working like. Actually those hairs did not pass into the geometry. That'S exactly what we want, so I'm going undo and now there's just there are there's this huge suite of tools that aren't used, because how often do you actually have to really get down and dirty you the hair? So right now I could like start gently brushing these specific ones and wherever my brush hits they will be affected. So I have to be really careful about the angle. You see that I kind of leveled off the camera so we're viewing it from the side. Yeah and I'll say this one over and then even that we lost that hair and I think if you use a small bracket, we can increase or decrease the size here. Oh cool that works on everything actually, but if I make it smaller, I can grab this that one kind of straight and keep in mind these are guides everything else interpolates between them. So we might actually have some trouble with that as well. But I kind of pulled that guy here and let's say these are going to get swept this way a little bit, and so we could spend hours and hours brushing hair and you can also throw and clump and stuff I've seen what those do as well. I played a little bit with those I'm actually not entirely sure. Okay. This is gon na affect everything, but let's say we want this one to be swirled around, so I'm actually going to go to our simulate hair selection tools and I rip that off wet it. Not rip off simulate hair, tear off cool, I'm going to do something like a rectangle selection, and actually, I guess I'll do lasso and I'm going to say. I only want to deal with these points. Well, and now I don't know how the swirl works entirely so or the curl. So, let's just click and see what happens and well that's granny curler, just twirling around there it looks like every individual hair is twirling, which is interesting, um, which isn't actually necessarily we want. We get some nice curls there, but let's say that we actually want these to kind of spiral around uh. If I don't, I don't see a specific way to do it. So, oh we have. We also have to lose restrict by restricting now that she don't know that, apparently wasn't it well visible only long khanh, here, selectional like there, it is selected only there. Okay, now only the ones I've selected, so we'd actually have to go through and can now you see it wasn't terribly hard to do. I like this whirly one um so, but I mean like I I have spent on the project I had to do that. I spent hours combing a character's hair for like a still and then you can get like any hairstyle. You want. It'S amazing. Did you everything that you would spend hours combing hair when you got it virtual hair 3? When you do 3d, you do a little bit of everything so yeah a so that without working, if I I can actually use regular selection tool. So if a command, a you'll, actually select all the points again well, so I can, you know, go through and just add, let's just add a little variation here like effectively. We only want actually, what's the angle, you, okay, this one. So let's make it look good. Just from this angle sweet, so let's get this one doing something, so I'm going to try, maybe brushing that one back a little and then near the top it'll kind of swirl down down here. Let'S have this one kind of push forward. I, like all this hand, randomness, you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of tools in cinema, that you can click on and have it be random. But it's kind of like based on a noise random. You know yeah and the fact that you're getting in with your with your mouse and like just really kind of random a doing something is giving it this heat more. I think more human fuel yeah once we hit render like I mean like I know I would think like this - is where you're doing the art part of it is like these. I mean I'm all about doing things parametrically and procedurally, but like here I mean to do a lot of this. You just have to you just have to paint it now. I have no, this might be awful yeah. Let'S just go ahead and go to our proper camera angle and hit render and see what we have now. I think this camera guy moved a little bit, but I kept the linking from out. It obviously must over it. I got undo camera view. Oh, that's not! Gon na work yeah just kind of center I'll - just not - I hope here, oh yeah, so let's render our hairs and see what we're getting so we're actually getting some cool flow here like they like we're, definitely getting the swirl vibe and these are pushing around. Like that's actually working pretty well yeah um now the big problem is that the hair is just not going to render to look like hay that much like we probably push it further and tweaking, but what we actually are going to need is geometry, yeah and the Other thing you're never going to get with hair is the anti-aliasing or I'm sorry, the ambient occlusion between it. Yes, and that is going to be a big part of this look - is getting all those little detailed shadows that you, as far as I know, can't do with a hair render you got ta use geometry. Yet the hair hair gives you good volume, but the volume is like between hairs. Any individual hair can't have a volume really um. Let'S see and there's a bunch of tools here, like this area, we're starting to look a little bare, so you can actually go back to. I haven't used this in years, but one of them is comb. Curl cut push Oh straighten by using the straighten tool. Oh that's on everything currently selected. So if I did a live selection and just grab a couple of these guys, not visible only grab a couple of these guys, I can actually go to the straighten tool and that's I dragged they actually start slowly, reverting to their original position. Well so like, if you push it down a little too much like you, can pull them back that way: okay, cool! So we're actually going to save this as another version, because we're dealing with a lot of potential geometry here. So we are now going to go into the hair object and instead of rendering hair, we are going to go to the generate tab. I'M going to say: don't render the hairs anymore and we're going to say what is this now, so we could say, let's try doing something light to see if it's like super complicated, so I'm going to do a triangle. So what this should be doing, in theory, is changing every single hair to a triangle sweep so we have real geometry now and actually that's running incredibly fast. This is the same concept we're using the pillar render, but those are straight and because their hair only has to calculate that one time um, so we actually get incredibly fast refresh. So I thought this would be really bad. It'S actually working really well is amazing, um. So, let's go from triangle to a circle: hopefully it's not it's going to be a lot heavier, but hopefully it's not super heavy boom. It popped and now that pop that's going to refresh - and we could see all it really accurately now we can, we can go into the Advanced tab and I can put a star cap or an end cap. We want end caps, which it's going to take a second for it to calculate, and then it's going to be fast again. So now we get this and now we actually have the caps on there now, but the caps are there they're welded automatically, so we're getting some phone problems so the way we fix that, I think is we can actually. Oh, it's got a foam tag. So if I just limit our Fong angle - and our limit is really high right now, so if I set that to something like 20 to my favorite Fong limiting angle - hopefully that will pop in actually is a little too small. So, let's go up to like 45. Anything under 90 would really work, and that should smooth that out properly, we still get our hard edge cool um. Now I suggest, when you're combing your hair and whatnot, it's going to take this long to refresh every change we make, is going to take that long to refresh and then run quickly, but every refresh will take a while. So only show this geometry once you're kind of down to like okay. What is it rendering like, but now what's super cool is all this is still controlled via this hair. So, even though the hair is not rendering, if we throw, if I just turn on frizz, going to take a second, but if you watch the viewport no way, but no all the frizz pops in so we can now add a little bit of randomness. On top of what we were doing so maybe the frizz isn't good, because I effect the endpoints a lot um, but if we maybe we put a little bit kink in there. Let'S see, if that looks any good, I don't know, is super spaghetti II. So we might people put like a little bit of variation in there like these are the scales with scale seems alright, but if we just put maybe like 10 % with a lot of variation, I mean some of them might stick out, and some of them won't They'Re up there: okay! Well, that's not bad like a little bit of variation in there and then something like clumping might actually be pretty good uh. This is the radius of which a tricycle um, I'm not sure what our overall scale is. So it would be kind of just grabbing the dark, but oh it even does count based on percentage, which is cool. That means, if we increase the hair, can it doesn't mess up our clumps, but by turning on clumps it'll, actually pinch a couple clusters together, um and let's push it super far just so, we can kind of see what it's doing. So, by pulling this up, look you see that we start getting all these nice little pinchy swirls going, which is really really cool. I don't know if that meal, I obviously went way far. It'S like dirty hair button yeah, you just came out shower and saw spiky kind of thing, so we could do a little bit of clumping and whatnot. So that's working pretty well now a big thing in our reference is we get like big fat pieces of of hay and we get these tiny little thin ones. So we really want to try to get that variation in here. So I think we can probably do that via our thickness and here's our variation, I'm not 100 % if the variation is global or additive. So if I turn on four, would you get zero yeah? Do we get zeros so um? I don't so I hit render pretty subtle, um so obviously taking a while to prepare, not sure yeah. I guess that's a big question. I mean I guess it's having to calculate shadow maps for all this and yeah. It'S gon na be a lot of geometry and for that for the lighting, so we may have to retool the lighting just based on the geometry yeah and what make it out. Oh yeah yeah. We can make this editable and then we won't have to do that. Pre calculation, so once we're kind of happy with it, we could be like okay, here's the done this one's done. It'S also doing a ton of anti-air up. I keep saying into a listening today, but I mean ambient occlusion yeah. That was going really like it's pretty much stopped dead from all the ambient, so yeah you're, also using the local machine, which is only one set to one core. That is true. Always do a team render okay I'll leave that bit to you and even now, as we're doing these tweaks, like that, looks really cool, but we can easily go back into our hair, and this is like all we did was was brush our guides, which means we Can still change the number of hairs whenever we want, so I can go back in here and knock off one of these zeros and that means it'll be showing a tenth the number of hairs. We can really quickly work with it and I don't know, but if I hit render hopefully this would calculate really quick like you immediately went to shadow maps and it's immediately gelling here and now it's I didn't change any render settings, but there's so much, there's not As much geometry, so it's going to calculate everything way faster, that's great um see we could always even light it with these numbers yep and then crank it up exactly now, it's hard to oh yeah. We were checking on the thickness and it does seem like we have some pretty dang thin ones um. So maybe that's exactly we want I'm just just for the sake of learning. Let'S crank it up to something hugely 12. Oh an hour gain real-time feedback. So now we get these big old fat ones and we get some skinny ones. Honestly, Oh something I didn't know, and it's a little disappointing actually is. This is adding variation to both the root and the tip. So keep that in mind because you'll see this one starts out super skinny and it gets all fat and that's weird it's just because adding that kind of variation to both of them so and this curve will only apply to the global. So that's just something to keep in mind: it's just a limitation we're going to be dealing with here. In addition to that, we also have our scale and if we turn on scale variation, it'll actually randomly make it'll just take the entire hair, hair and scale it up and down um. That might be what more, what we need, then mm-hmm, then the thickness, yeah, thin and thick is important, but I think visually that's going to do enough for us, so adding this kind of variation there for scale. Once again, I'm gon na crank up crazy eye. So you can see all the variation or we get these little stumpy hairs and we get even longer ones, so it does push up and down probably need it quite that far I'll pull it back and that's actually working pretty well now, what's going to be really Cool is this: is we get to texture? The real geometry, um III still almost feel like. We should drop that back down into a triangle. I want to glam a different display mode and I'll see how many polygons is actually giving us. I actually think the triangles would rent even render nicer, because that hay is really kind of a flat ya know: it's really a flat piece. If you look at the original or if you just picture like a piece of grass, it's really kind of a two-dimensional. You know it's really kind of more like a paper than it is a round kind of thing yeah. So this gives us a little bit of volume and it will go a lot faster with a lot. Less geometry. Ya know that this is how much geometry we have a kind of spinning around it, but how many segments we have, which is adding a lot of geometry, is determined in our hair tab and our hair tab. We have that the number of segments we have twelve and there'd be twelve subdivisions in here. So if I were to drop that down to eight like you'll, see it all immediately drops and if you don't need like we have a bunch of curly twisty hairs, you need a lot of geometry. But if you don't, if it's smoother, then then you can actually ate away with us and we just not out a ton of the geometry from the scene and visually. I don't think it's gon na make that huge of it. Look how fast that's rendering now like him before, even with a lower number, it was taking a lot longer to render I've clearly rotated us to oblivion, but what's really cool now is we will be texturing this via normal materials like we're, just we're just texturing a Sweet nerve at this point I'm pumped um, I'm pumped so honest. Well, honestly, uh like this is really cool. They obviously did their homework. As far as making hay look correct, I I would tend to I would square that looks like I can't point at the screen. Bro, if you could point at that, piece see how like that little most looks like a square or even it might even be a triangle. It'S like really flat feeling like it, has definite sides like that little one sticking straight up the little alfalfa piece there. Uh, hey, I use bail bail for a hay bale. Oh I I do not know how it worked anyway, but what I would do is instead of referencing theirs directly. We could, like maybe google different pictures of hay, oh yeah, and now we have this now we're not referencing their image directly as far as uh, like maybe sourcing colors, and I love sourcing colors. If I were to pull this down, I can um. Actually, we want variation in here. So how would we you tackle variation per hair outside of ammo graft context? Won'T the hair, so the hair, the hair settings, are doing everything except texturing. It corrects that true. Is there any way to handle that mmm? No no variation within it have to be just based on the specular angle. I guess well here here's my intent. No here's, my thinking Chris. I really don't think there's gon na be a lot of individual differences yeah in the texture, so I would actually just make it one color sure and we're going to use ambient occlusion and specular to create the variation based on lights and reflections and all that. So something I get to show off here is right now on the Mac, if I click to grab a color, this is cinema's color picker, but I actually like the system color picker a lot more, so I'm going to go into file and actually edit preferences and Then, if we go to units, I can click use system, color, picker and now, when I click I'm gon na move cinema out of the way. Now, when I click the little image, it picks up the it opens the Mac one if you're on a PC, you're still kind of screwed, but I can click. I can click this magnifying glass and I can go over here and pick the exact color from anywhere on the screen. So I want to kind of find a midpoint here, not the brightest, not the darkest, and it it's almost never the color. You think it would. I thought there's a lot more yellow in here, but that's actually very kind of a peachy yeah and we can always you know kind of managing expectations like maybe we do put more yellow in there, but I could just take this material. Throw it directly onto this object and well, I guess I am kind of expecting a little more yellow, so I'm going to go ahead and just put a little extra in there. So that's going to turn into a lot of like reflectance and getting the ambient color going and um got just a lot of fun texture stuff. So I might be able to pass this off over to you now to do a little bit more lighting and all that good stuff. I can always come back in the texturing, we're starting a little faceting on the curve, so I'm actually gon na go back into the hair and go back up to the twelve segments. But not the triangle will leave the triangles. So I'm gon na go ahead and save that and now you can take over and maybe do a little bit of texture lighting. I guess we can close those of those up close these out the brush tool. So the thing the thing to me before I get into the textures and lighting I'll just grab your opinion on this case, the more curly and wavy it is the less pay it is to me, like the more of this um. Did you think tough? Is that the case? That'S doing that now you get the my smoother curves yeah. This feels more um, because I think the thing with hay is that as soon as it's bent far enough, it's gon na break so you're really getting swirls of straight pieces. Sure, if that makes sense like it's all, if you, if you look at each individual piece, you're gon na see a straight piece but they're all coming together to create a swirl. If that makes sense, that is very true. I mean I even along those lines. Let'S try I look down at it over again, yeah quick. If we drop these segments down to like one yeah, then we're literally going to have a straight piece, and these are all now super straight, and if we I mean, I think, if you then put that means they're. All gon na have like a right in the middle, oh they always might. I mean I mean it, render real, quick and just see what that does. But yet now we have a series of here we get the band, it's not too bad, but she would get this or else you get that harsh ban the bend. But if we go down to one then literally, these are all straight pieces, but we don't lose the swirl. So here's my theory if we keep it at one and we second of all cheat a bit and texture are inside. Oh tough piece with the same texture, but then go back and add more hairs. Yes, uh! You click on the hair object itself may be on the final writer, the a dizzy row. So once we get more hairs in here, I'm just going to turn off our immune occlusion just for a kind of a quicker render here but watch. I think this is going to give us our kind of like straight hair piece. Now, there's not a lot of detail because of the ambient occlusion stuff, but once this is on and I haven't tested the team render with this yet but we'll see if it works. It'S definitely too big, but I think all that little detail that's going to help a lot really a little more like spaghetti than hey right now, but there's a lot of texturing stuff where we might want put a little luminance in there because it you know, there's A transparency to it and that's not working the but like I really like that's our best piece, yeah um, alright. So here's how I would approach it. I would say um this, the just real, quick, the thickness. I would just drop this stuff down. Oh 2.5 drop! This down and then once we get kind of a good uh, once we get kind of a good um a render with basic lights, then we could start to go in and do more, so I'm going to turn our render settings a little bit lower. Just we could see them quicker and you guys could view it with us in the in the picture viewer. So here we go picture viewer, go down my man so now we're talking. We lost your aiming like because I pulled that way back, so we're getting really dark in some of those areas, yeah so that so instantly I would pump the global light back up to get a real nice base kind of level color. What was that boom? I always miss it. Optional tab control, tab boom did it yeah. I'Ve already filled it out a little bit more yeah. So already you can see the difference between without the global light and with the global length and then we're relying on the ambient occlusion to really fill in the gap. The next thing is specular, so you can see when light hits hey like this. It'S going to really bling it out, so it's got a lot of specular. Now we can do this with reflection, true reflection with with reflectance and all that stuff. But when you have this much detail on this, it's actually where specular does make more sense. Hello, blurry reflection: this would be obscured yeah, so um, I'm gon na go into our default specular, that's already built in now. The only speck it's going to grab is this one light, so we might want to add some other lights. Maybe that are just specular, and I do this a lot with hair so and like multiple things like this, so I'm just going to crank up first of all, our specular, I'm not going to make it white, so I do want it in the color family. But I want to skew it into that color. So it's not a white specular. This already helps specular a lot. If you just make it not white um and then I'm going to add another lights. That is only a speck light. Now we could add it and add shadows and maybe we'll need that, but I'm just going to go here and turn off diffuse. So it's not going to give it any more light anywhere. It'S only going to add specular hits, so I'm just going to grab that light and move it over and behind and up so I'm going to kind of move my camera for now and make sure kind of this is where I'm looking at it. I'M going to look from above and make sure that it's kind of off to the side, but it has to be above it because we're trying to make like kind of a rim light out of spec and the way that that looks. Hopefully is all this stuff. Will kind of get brighter? So let's do let's do a render with our specular cranked up. We have a rear speck. We have all this stuff happening and then let's just do a kind of compare and contrast. So there you go, you can see the speck popping on to that texture there. We also lost our rear specular, mostly because we have no no shadow, so you do want to make sure your shadows are on, or else it'll just pop specular on everything we can also brighten this up, and in this case, because we're using such flat objects. This rim light effect, might not work as well as I thought, there's really no rounding happening, especially on this side. They'Re kind of sticking out straight along those lines, though, wouldn't it maybe catch individual hairs better instead of like transitioning between them, maybe even kill the other lights. So we can see just what that one is doing. That'S good idea, so here's a render with just our rim light I'm going to turn it up just so we can see its effect and we're trying to build a rim around the object to give it kind of a more of a fuzzy feel we're really only Catching that right here, so I think I'm just going to cheat it and pull forward and just kind of off to the side more instead of to the front and that might grab even just small, we'll be able to see this really quickly. That'S that's the rim. Right there see so at that scale. You know it's all about scale with at this scale. It'S going to it's going to be a lot cleaner. Now, let's turn the other light on and we could balance the two lights. But now we have a little bit more sense of depth because we have this kind of hotspot here that's coming through and then we'll have our front piece. So that might be a little little warm or a little bright. So let's knock that to 150. Let'S turn on our other light and see how they combine it's looking pretty good in places now. I think the ambient occlusion overall is just too much the thing to remember with an occlusion, it's all about scale, so a default cube. I always pull a default cube into my scene when I'm working with ambient occlusion a default cube is 200 by 200 by 200. Centimeters right, which means, if you take a plane and you put it at the bottom of a cube and you make sure, there's enough room out front here: let's just go zoom in here and we hit render now. I should probably make a new white material there. We go one more quick render, so we have our plane, we have our cube and the ambien is looking at these contact shadows and trying to add shadows as they get closer together by default, a mean occlusion is looking a hundred centimeters, which means the farthest. The shadow will go is halfway up this um, this object right. So that is a lot of calculations to worry about, and it's also way more than any individual one of our hairs is making for detail. So we can turn that number down like 10. This will do a couple things it will. Let'S just do a render here and we'll compare and contrast on the on the plane. Now we just get a little baby contact shadow, here's, the bigger one, here's the little one and it's going to render faster. It'S not going to calculate as much and you can see already over here. It'S not pulling as much detail into our thing, so we're gon na have to find the balance, but I think that's going to be an important setting for us. So let's go back to our camera. Let'S turn off our little settings here. I already know it's going to be higher than 10, but we could find a balance, maybe in 30 and with more contrast, so it's a little darker. So let's do a look here. I think that's going to help our render times for sure, and it's going to give us a little bit more detail in between each individual piece. The other cheat here is that black is a little bit heavy. You can see, there's really no black, almost never good. Like and it's also like, it seems like the shadows - are quite red, actually it so it's gon na it's going to base a lot on some of the colors, but it's also the perception of that black on top of the object. So what you could do with a MIDI occlusion at all times is look at your shadows, where what is your environment? Look like you could either pick a color from the environment like this or you could just pick a color of the object, picking it if the object is all the same color. If your ambient occlusion remember, is a pass that goes on top of everything. So you really have to make sure that your your shadows and everything are almost going to be one color but think of your environment and then just pick a color, that's more in line with that. So we can pull this up and we know it's in this family over here. It'S in this brown kind of family and we can pull this down, and now our shadows are going to be that color, just pulling up a little bit from black, is going to do a lot of work to make it less dark. So you can see the difference right in the middle there we could probably brighten it up more but see how much more yellow that is feeling that's the right. That'S the right move. We could even brighten it up even more so we nothing will be darker than that color. We just won't. Let it allow it now with the contrast. We might have pushed it that way. But now, let's compare the two there's black much brighter nice and warm almost like a subsurface scattering kind of feel, because that's really what you're trying to find is this is the inside color of this. The other thing you could do is play with your global light. So if you really want it to be brighter, you just pull up that global light. Now everything is going to get light and the ambient occlusion will be added on top of that or you know like multiplied on top of it. So subtle difference, but now we're just bumping that whole thing up boom boom there you go so a lot of little details for each one of those. This kind of specular over here is just still not my favorite thing. I'Ve ever done so I'm just going to move it, we're actually getting some specular detail in our on our object. If we turn off that that lighting there, we can actually dial up or down the specular and find a good spot for it now, because all these little hairs are moving all around the place we may we may find a weird place for this. Well, let's see what that looks like I don't I don't even know if there's a setting of this, in fact, I'm gon na look at my laptop while you're doing this, but if we can randomly twist those hairs around, then they could each individually be catching specular. Is better or right now they're kind of being caught in clusters, so I mean, let me try see if I can find that. Well, we have thickness length scale, that's density or you doing clump Bend twists. We it looks like they are twisting. So if the checkbox isn't on it won't be twisting. Oh, I see I give it lots of variation and with that, might that might actually do a lot a twist and I'm not sure if twist is doing what we think it might actually twirl them together. Mmm. I see what you're saying, but without without a lot of geometry, they'll Chris as well without all the individual. What would you call them? The sections that you made for this? I'M not sure that it will the segments I'm thinking. Maybe the segments will keep it from twisting, since we only have one segment per piece. I just mean the overall sweep would be twisted. Oh each one yeah each one, but I'm gon na look for a setting, so you just keep doing you doing all right. Hopefully, uh yeah and Chris is talking about having each little french fry here, see how they're all aiming in the same direction. Chris is going to look for a way so that each one is pointing a little bit more randomly, but I think we're pretty close with um with this here. If you want a more of a light source like this, you might want to try like a larger. You know light like a softbox kind of kind of look to get more of the reflections and everything, but this gets pretty pretty close. While Chris is messing with that, I just wanted to try one thing that I wanted to try this whole time, which is uh. Basically, duplicating this rounded platonic here and just I'm gon na take everything off of it, and this is just going to be a guide. I'M gon na scale this up and I'm going to UM. Oh, can I melt this back down to its individual polygons or not? Yes, uh right-click and go run triangulate all right. I could do that. Oop nope, you missed it. You don't lose polygons! That'S what happens when I right-click! Oh here I get my rope. I'M gon na right-click, I'm going to distress, works a lot better with a mouse. When I should note down, actually it's going to give us exact reports, but I don't think you care, I don't think it matters. All I wanted to do was um. Do a quick, um, atom array on the platonic? Oh, that those those will matters. So you just make a new one. I make a new one yeah, we just make a new one, and that was a buckyball dodecahedron dodecahedron, let's scale it up, make sure it's the same scaling everything's perfect boom. Let'S dump that in instead and now we'll have to melt those pieces. But that is a really quick way to get that um mesh around it that I know we didn't really get to, but that would be the fast way to do. It is to use them use an atom array just want to play with out there all right. What'D you get we might actually be able to. If we gave our self a bunch of segments, we might actually be able to squish the hairs in dynamically. We'Re not going to tackle that, but there is possibilities today anyway, to get these randomly rotating really straightforward. I'Ll have to just go back to the generate tab, go to alignment and set it not from free but to random, and now each one of them is real instant. We do that we're gon na have a specular is going to be completely different. It will, but I think this is going to be a critical move. Look at that yeah there we go wow that made a huge difference. Critical move lay that between real flat kind of pieces. Well, now, all of a sudden, it's all malt and we can all randomly the main thing being when you look up here, you see how like this, this highlight is like this big big glaring highlight in one particular spot as soon as we randomly rotate, it gets Spread out among all of its neighbors, oh dude, that see this makes me want to kind of tint that that specular a bit now we can really dial dial the specular um and find a place for it. So yeah you're getting really good real-time feedback on that yeah we're getting we're getting some good good feedback here now we can make this even more of like a fuzzy arm specular and not as much of just like a side kind of afterthought. I think this might actually make it look a little bit more fuzzy in the back yeah those little catches right there and that's that's the that's the thing for me, like all those little all these little like fuzzy thing, and this is going to anytime. You have hair, a backlight is always gon na make these little edges pop like that um, but man, I think that's pretty close buddy uh, I mean yeah. I mean we like if I was trying to recreate that image or if there's a job like you, spend five more hours doing things I was thinking about. If we want to get additional variation in the size and whatnot, we can actually copy. The hair object. Have multiple hair objects? Yeah multiple hair objects means we could have darker strands of hay and lighter strands of hay. I mean look at the specular, that's super broad, but yeah that could be you know. Maybe we maybe we do a last minute check on the specular, because that's going to do a lot of difference, so it maybe, instead of it being so high, it's got a little bit more. It'S like a little more squarish and that's going to really bling out the the speck on more pieces. You'Re just going to see it more of it more of it and it's going to be a lot brighter. So there's a good difference between the two much brighter. Overall, I think you're right, that's that broad spec is a thing. The other thing I would do and and all of these are last-minute things right. I try this all the time when I'm playing with hair and all these kind of thing. I know we're not actually rendering here, but it's with all these different particle kind of things. I'M gon na I'm always going to try these these last minute tries. So I'm going to turn off diffuse, I'm going to try to find another good place for specular, maybe it's actually from below, because it's a little bit dull on the bottom and then just try like a slightly different color. So there we go same camera angles same everything and we're going to go because of our specular settings. We could just pick up a little bit more detail on the bottom. There see how it filled in the bottom, just by adding that speck, and actually we have to turn on at least some soft shadows, because it's really adding spec to everything even stuff above it. So you want to make sure you at least have some soft shadows on, so that the specular is not again hitting everything on the object. It'S only where the light is sure. So now we can compare these we're getting down to these little subtle moves. Yeah. I think Chris, what you're saying is we can tweak each one of these little hairs, a million different ways to make it look a little tighter to this original, but I think the concept other than you know I'm seeing maybe some some size things we could try.