Blender Hair Styling Part 1

Hi guys this is Rico, and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to do here in bender in a controlled and relatively easy way to do. A lot of people have been asking me how I do here in the inner and it's it's kind of a tricky thing that took me a while to learn how to do it effectively, because uhm hair is like it's really hard to control, even in the real World there's all these, you know zillions of little strand thingies and you find a way to control all of them, so it's really hard and in the CG it's even harder. So blender does a really good job of making it possible to control here and style. It and so on, so I'm going to show you how to use the tools that are available in bender to get acceptable results so we're starting with the model here and upload this model to YouTube for you guys. If you want to you this one I'll put it in the link in the description and this model is just really basic stuff. It'S the model and the scope nation, and this mission is it's: what's gon na contain the here particle system, so you'll notice it's like a very untidy, little mesh, but it doesn't matter because you know the skull doesn't move, and this is just going to be parented To the head in the end, so you have a nice little model and sculpt, so its scope, and I hate it and before we begin, you should make sure that the sculpt contains no modifiers and ctrl a to apply the scale, rotation and location. Well. Location is optional, but scale is the important one. You want to make sure that the scale needs a applied. Okay, let's get started, go over to your selector scope, mesh selected right there head over to your particles, tab here and new here; here's them! So this just a little bit larger advanced. We want I'd, want settings, okay, so just enable that - and let's hit the here, links a little bit shorter and we go for medium medium. Your stuff like that, should be good, so yeah cool. Now we go into particle edit mode, and this is what you get no particle. Edit mode has, if you're not familiar with it or if you tools that look pretty powerful and they are, they are pretty powerful. It'S got a cone, smooth, add links right, and these tools are what you're going to use to get the final result so over there starting of your hair. So what you'll have noticed if you've ever use these tools that, on the face of it, it's pretty hard? I mean how do you control those stray strands, and you know you can get decent results, but it's just it's kind of weird and then it feels clunky right and I'm sure anybody who's down here. In being as familiar with this, I mean you can get something that looks decent, but it just. This is pretty hard to control and when you tap out good mode, you'll see it. It just doesn't look the same anymore and it's got all kinds of issues and well we're gon na be looking that today. So first thing you want to do in your system in your particle, edit mode is a absolutely everything and it's delete. Particles are so empty that nothing nice and clean so now here add this little add button is to actually nice transients. Oh that's! What we're gon na do make sure that interpolate is switched on and set. The keys to about. Seven right should be good. What else deflect emitter should be kind of low? So, let's, like at point, zero five. Now, if you add in hairs like to start here, yeah the front and just add like six or seven years, we're adding them individually so make sure to count like that. If you've got like five and pad like five at a time - and it's not cool just just don't add silly until hairs like that - it just it's just making life difficult, so I'd like to 10 or 12 strands and then switch over to come to and yeah Select strength to about not 100 % hundred percent is just partly strong. You know, you know 100 percent. It acts like a like a whirlwind, so you want it to be at least thirty point five and not more than point I'd service. Let'S put in 0.16. That'S a bit: there gives a more natural reaction to your strokes. So now, with your brush, you start with a relatively large brush and you just start coming them. A little bit should be roughly how you think they'd be add. Now the lengths obviously increases the length if you hold shift it decreases it without trip. It increases it kind of like sculpting, so shift just does the opposite for some brushes like comb, I don't think shift. Has any infected just come, please here. Okay, so now we've got like a base layer guide guide here I call them guide hairs and now, if you add and make sure until I switch it on again now, I should continue adding you'll see that to come back to one you'll see that the new Strands that you add in here are actually following the other one, the other ones. So that's really useful and another thing that you can do too for additional control is to select all your strands a just like mesh and hit H and then they're hidden they're. Still there like this little liked previous thing, that means they're still there, but now you can actually work on another clump of here. Well, this one isn't depicted so I don't count. You know that does remain the same. That works wonderfully a little bit shorter for this. Fourth point here, so we've got a fringe type of thing here. I'Ve got a camera set up here, so he's gon na check out this from that camera. Maybe some longer comb it down and again your comb brush shouldn't be too strong. It'S too strong it. Just it's impossible to work with it. So yeah point six point: seven there abouts should be did for the broader strokes. If you once you're doing like the minut little tweaks, it can go even weaker. Okay out h to unhide those - and you see when they're running and hidden when they appear they're orange. That means they're selected now. Cool thing about selecting here is that only the selected strands are influenced by a brush strokes, so I can, for example, hold my mouse over this one here and he how to select it el hell, and then you see it's like a mosque. It works like a mosque. You can tweak and modify these without influencing the rest of them. Okay, so using the selection tools and the and hiding clumps of here certain thumbs up here, it helps a lot to kind of get more control out of it. Another thing: that's really useful is um subdivision, so you can select here, say those hairs over there and hit W and in here subdivided, so you can subdivide them to get more control, especially the area where they're coming out to sculpt them um, another thing yeah. So, that's that that's great for control and you can really fine-tune - and you notice - I probably got a feel here so far - that's because we're gon na not gon na be adding like the zillions of hairs on this scope, we're gon na be using children. It'S in kind of simulate the additional hairs so we're just adding like the base control control hairs. I liked our column C so they're like there's this going to be telling all the other hairs what to do so. There doesn't have to be actually the less you can get away with the better, just make sure they're evenly distributed, and they have the volume and the styling that you want with him. So I'm going to hide those just work on this for partying, always you're making chocolate should be switched on its. These here looks right, see if the ones we just and calmed it a little bit, not much. If you find that the hairs look a bit chunky, you can always increase the plastic stuff. You know and they're like smoother like. If they I think default, is they look really blocky and that doesn't cool. So just it's actually just a preview, because if you tap out of I'm here in Atlanta, they all the same again and I'll show you how to fit them exactly of it. So here we are I'm just starting to look like something alt H, those are selected. So other ones, one being first, is that pull around the ear over there cool, that's cool. Let'S add a few more over here you can like throw the tools in the hair. Edit mode are the same as Michigan attitudes. So I used to select everything and deselect. W has some options like subdivide and so on. Yeah I'll talk you through these things, as we get to them anyway, control eyes to invert. The selection, nice links a bit longer a little bit more. That'S all about. Okay! Now that that you see right there, I'm trying to calm it inwards and it won't hit me that's because of the sitting right here deflect the emitter I like to switch this off once I get to startle things, so I just just no matter how low you Set it at some point: it's gon na block you in it. That'S just the sculpin ish trying to calculate like the boundaries of where you love to put it best on the normals or something I'm not sure how it works. But some point: I just switch it off it's great in the beginning, when you're adding the first hairs to just kind of make sure that they don't intersect with the sculpt but later on, it gets kind of pointless because the other hair is already guarding any new. The hairs you add so that looks okay preview, the same way: okay, hey! I just like everything and a few more in here control, I invert. The selection just call them up just fill in the gaps. It'S basically yeah here. Editing and styling is just about to filling in the gaps. I guess it's like you start with something and you just keep filling in, so it looks good. So that's what I try and do here, it's cold cold. This way. Now all these little vertexes here can be disabled. If you just click on this one here - and it just shows like the strands, but then you can tell if you completely select the hairs, so it's got like three different modes: there's classified strands, vertex mode and tip mode, so it just has an exception. You can manipulate the tips if you want to, and we'll probably be doing it a little bit later. I like to people on the vertex mode for the most part again hold your mouse over strand, I'll, select the whole strand to isolate it and then just comb. It out, okay, um just keep going and I come so as you can see, this is a lot easier. It'S a control to here, then just trying to call me in time. Mess like I did in the beginning and just doesn't work check. You want to keep him here relatively tiny, but especially on the links you want to keep them relatively. Even I don't have to be perfect otherwise, showing up looking like Spock from you know, not a perfect haircut, and we don't want that because yeah she look weird. I guess so you just want to keep them relatively the same links. What did I just do, and these are way too long, little exciting moment, laughing you're, not that far out no mature and you just come independent. You just lady thing here see work that pin down the links a little bit. It'S good, that's good and then you'll notice. Every time before I add, I just select all the hairs so that I can invert the selection after I've added in order to work on the strengths that I just added to the system. So add a little bit of variation to that that not too much if you just do like so just but look good in the end. You know keep in mind we're gon na be adding children to this. So anything you do here is gon na be like multiplied hundredfold, so you want to make sure you've got a good foundation. What'S gon na try to select this guy here you go. Try to fix that there. That was another thing you can do is see as in mich Simic mode. You can see to select certain vertices I like to do this to isolate like some some here and yeah. You know I mean it's just about refining and fighting filling in the gaps. So, let's keep doing that trying to get similar here starts about my other artwork step. Sure you've seen you may have seen. Thank you. It'S like this fluffy type of hairstyle. That'S got like now. It'S trying to get something attractive: appealing, okay, cool, just going to look pretty good and some more down here, just above the here and there obviously right too long. So, let's shortening a little chicken cannot come again, probably a good idea to keep previewing it in the camera just in case, especially if you doing a still frame, if you're doing an animation, you wanted to look good from all angles, but if you're doing a still Frame doesn't really matter, you can just make sure it all looks good from one angle: cool, let's preview it with some children, nice yeah, it's got potential, it's adding those Lost years. Now that happens. It means that here is trying to copy all the other hairs on the edge they just gon na bring it out told how it's supposed to be. You need anything else you add in the vicinity will copy it so they're still not perfect but exciting mode. So I that's like that, one as well: okay, let's just calm them, alright. I think it's supposed to be this way, I'm not sure, because I've got my laptop opposite action more like that, and this is the great thing about mostly not gon na go crazy. It'S subdivided me for longer strands you wan na sub. You live in sometimes because they change a little bit chunky to work with less control points it has harder is used to work with trying to get flow of the hair right. You can use the smooth brush. Don'T always work that well in some cases it does this case. It doesn't preview that place out there yet, but we'll get there. Okay, these two should probably flow with those over there yeah. Okay, now I get to choking tribulation, because I just want a bunch of straight ones right up here, so this way I'd. I think that fringe is serious, pointing the wrong way I'll, try and fix it. Okay, I'm just gon na speed this up because it's kind of boring - and you know I guess you guys - get the idea right here - we go okay, so we now have. We have a nice little nice hair system. So when you look at this in, like normal viewport, it looks really really ugly and it's just a few hairs and there's really no enough. So this is what we're gon na be using the children for, but before we do any of that, I'm going to be showing you some of the settings that you need to do before going any further with this. So let's go from the top. Is he doing nine is too much here and let's see what else nothing here, nothing here, parents - and I will that just also renders the parents strands in addition to the children strands later on. I think so another one you want to look at is here in the display tab. This is all under the particle settings. Finally, so displayed tab steps. This is the one you want to go to about for longish, hair and, like this, you probably want to go to about four or five should be good. I'M gon na keep it at pol because my laptop is not so beefy. If you cactus all the way to seven, it takes a really lot of juice to render and so on. I keep mine at four and then also run in angle B spline. I think this is only relevant if you remain during certain mode for the line segments, I'm not sure what this does honestly, I just know if you can able to kind of gives you better results in the final render. So already you can see, the hair is looking a lot better, only one or two snips. It looks really bad, then with b-spline yeah. So I take it to foreign who the b-spline okay. So that's our base system now enable interpolated in children tab. So immediately. That looks quite a bit better, you can see, we've got more hair and so on. Let'S kind of render 100 strands and sounds displaying tin. So let's set this 200 and you can see well, it looks okay, but it looks very chunky and so yeah and see if we can do anything about that. I'M gon na set this to about 50 to get good viewport performance or better viewport for phones jump. I'M setting this I like to keep it from IT. 200. I'M gon na I'm gon na go something like 0.9. I guess everyone's okay, the shape of each clump, basically controls how fat the company's you can see if I'm treating it towards the positive get fatter towards the negative get sternum, that's really useful. We can do ours about 0.3, okay, okay links, basically just controls. The links of each strand based on uses the parent strand for a for a guide. Okay, we're gon na keep that a hundred percent actually put it out in 19 and set the threshold to something point: five it. That means it only makes half of the hair slightly shorter and helps to kind of get that fuzzy fluffy type of look but like that parting is basically how strong each parent here is, how how much of an influence it has on its own particular children. So I like to keep it very low or zero to begin maximum, not worry about that seed seed gives you different outcomes like random outcomes, based on the parameter that you say here is just like a random value, so you can go through these and find something That you, like, I guess, I'll, keep it at zero. I guess well known here. This often helps a lot to keep children better shape. I guess like if you disabled, they kind of they just yeah. It doesn't have that much volume. You put it like that. So that's great roughness curve is just a curve that controls the roughness over here, but we're not going to use that right. Now. We'Re gon na be using the roughness settings the values here. So the curves know that if you want a finer control of your roughness, then you can use a curve. I don't use it very often. I don't find it that necessary, but just know that you can use it okay, so the roughness settings right here uniform roughness. Obviously is just like a random value that adds across the entire system, I like to add a little bit, but not too much, so it is yeah, something like that submitted in point draft, this one's interesting. It Ruffins the hint tips over here, as you can see. As I increase the value, the tips right here are become more fried out. You know, like rougher, I like to keep it low as well, but I do like to put in a little bit there and then the shape if you increase the shape it's kind of confusing, because then the amount of roughness towards the tip moves towards the tip And as you decrease it, it moves towards the root of each hair. So roughness is here right now and the shape is at one. The roughness is that normal, it's with the shed 2.6 and then the roughness moves a lot more towards that and if you put there the shape like zero, I think the roughness image across the whole thing not sure yeah more than one is usually good. So I'm gon na put mine to about well. What'S him what not a little bit? Okay, that looks a night all right, there's a random value. Now this is uniform roughness, so I'm not sure what the difference between uniform, roughness and random roughness is, but the random one is extremely. You know you can see the change right there it it has a huge effect and in many cases, is quite useful if you've got like this crazy type of character with wild crazy. Here, this one can be really useful, but we don't want that. We want a little bit of roughness and then we want a threshold, so I mean only certain strands are actually affected by it. This helps just to get that few stray strands are out there. So like they're, not all exactly following following the the parents perfectly. There are a few stray strands out there and this one yourself so there's the threshold rather high and random rough actually considers the threshold a little bit lower. Then random drop a little lower actually have no change. Here is more about tweaking and tweaking and tweaking the values and rendering and tweaking and rendering and tweaking so be prepared to actually do quite a bit of yeah, trial and error. You know, but these settings right here or we're not trying to work a lot today. Now pink settings: these are interesting, it's got a bunch of settings and each one of them will make your hair look totally different, which is cool, but also not quite practical, because the values yeah it's not quite practical, because the values down here are just too high. So I like to go with curl or wave for this type of here: radio, not sure how it works. Yeah, interesting pattern spiral, puts a spiral at the end of each here. Look at that yeah interesting result. If you increase the steps here on the spiral sitting, you get some interesting results, but not quite what I want so well that looks really nice but increased in frequency yeah. You can get some interesting stuff with this, but yeah the one the bride turns, and I think it takes each parents, children and just like spirals them around the parent, basically pretty cool, but we're gon na go with curl. I guess that's the cool wave that was cool, okay, so young, as you can see it's far too drastic right now. The effect is just breaking our entire hair system, so, first of all take the freakin sweet down or what so. Frequency is just how many curls there are per parent or per length of here, so more lace so about they. Wan na keep this pretty subtle and in the shape, as you increase the shape the effect of the curl yeah as you increase the shape. The effect of the curve moves more towards the tub and as you decrease it, it moves towards the root. So we might go about half way, I suppose a little bit more frequency the amplitude. This is like the severity I'll cuddle. So if you increase it increase it quite a bit, we can increase the frequency a little bit yeah shape, because I want the top strands up there up here, very little curl them and towards the tips they can add a little bit more. That looks nice um. This here is a bit of a mess wan na see. If I can fix that up, I think it's the random rough doing that or it could be so many other shameful death within a minute just one more time, flatness, I'm not sure what that does. It acts almost like a clump sitting up here, but yeah sure about that. We will see amplitude frequency from here a trial and error all the way. Okay, that should be really not too much. Okay, I'm like a bear without the curl okay, so we're gon na make we're gon na use clover. The very small amount - okay - and this is one feature that I personally would love to see in been receptive to have multiple pink sittings, like kind of like the modifier stack, but like multiple kink settings on top of one another. That would be really great, not sure how hard that is to implement probably pretty darn hard, but maybe in the future. You'Ll get that I don't know so: yeah, here's, here's our hair system and it's been a ton and it's looking nice debatable. I'M gon na keep tweaking this and do some test renders and yeah. I'M pretty sure this is this look nice I mean it's, it's nice and tidy easily go ahead, customize it quite a bit. It'S like just just able to hear what, while you're editing you say, all the children that cuz I just one bring up a couple of these spreads here, just making a little bit more ye. I thought that this also hats very much fun mesh anything you can set the transparency of the words use in some cases. Okay, a couple of those things about here, just before I'm done you can grab and rotate in scale here. So you grab a section key on the keyboard and you can actually move them around cool. Well, you can use the manipulators here. So if you select older here, you can actually adjust it a little bit which is really useful in them. Okay and same thing with project certain none I will use are on the keyboard. Otherwise, not selecting that you know you can rotate scale move here around just keep in mind that the roots will not move so why we do will be applied to the other parts of the hair. Not the reach, so scales are really useful. In some cases. You just want to reel it in just a little bit, so a couple of tino tips on here is always tried to keep the silhouette in mind. So i I like to sit my my hair color chain pitch black, so I'm mostly and then enable quite a lot of children and then zoom out, and you know, I've got like a silhouette and it helps me kind of evaluate the volumes and the shapes and All that I think this is looking pretty good pretty good. Indeed, that's looking good, of course, I'll probably want to do a little bit more tweaking on some of these things here, but overall, I'm pretty happy with this, and I hope you guys learned something and I'll be making another video or follow-up video. That shows how to actually do materials and rendering and stuff like that. So thanks guys, thanks for watching and kids yeah see you next time.