ZBrushCentral

Hair modeling pipeline

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Help needed!
I know this topic is not zbrush related but hopefully some of your guys could help me out anyway.

So I am working on a female head (image on the left side) and trying to figure out how to get the pipeline for the hair figured out.

My question goes, is there a way to use splines (in maya) or curves (in xsi) to create the planes for the hair? And how would I achieve such planes? A short guide on the workflow using splines or curves would be very much appreciated :wink:

and second, how would you uv map the planes? Would you create a “basic” shape that would have the uv’s layed out and then just copy the one, tweaking the shape but leaving the uv’s as they are.
I guess like the image below to the right (from Uncharted 2) they wouldnt have uv’ed every singel hair piece seperat right?

hair_help2.jpg

Any help or comment would be very much appreciated, thanks!

#2

Lofts or sweeps on rails using nurbs comes to mind, at least in Maya. Basically you draw a profile curve and the rail curve and just sweep them out, a basic geometry operation. Nurbs would have the advantage of parametric UV’s coming along for free, the whole loft or patch mapped to the 0-1 UV range, if I understand them correctly. I know you could then convert them to polys with an arbitrary resolution. Then it would be just copy and repeat.

#3

Maybe this step by step could be useful - http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=84280&page=2&pp=15

#4

Hi, I know this is not exactly what you were asking but I found its very easy and fast to render hair in ZB4 using Bestpreviewrender with subpixel AA


what i did for this test

1 Hair is just a triangular base piramide with about 20 sections. I can choose the width with inflate and smooth. for very fine hair just smooth them. the hair texture uv lets you mask from alpha so you can chose hairs bases or top

I made a lock and posed it with zsphere righ
 you can comb it and twist it very easy
 i also made a whole posable wig 
you can combine the different poses with layers of course and duplicate subtool to make it more dense.
for this i used just 1 wig subtool and about 100.000 polis but the bpr is soooo fast even with 1 million polygons wig
 previe.jpg

#5

Nimajneb is correct, though you’d use the extrude command under surfaces module. Start drawing your curve from where the hair follicle on the head would be. The create a square or appropiate shaped curve, center its pivot, hit ‘w’ to translate it. Hold the ‘c’ key and middle mouse drag on the hair curve and snap slide the second curve you made until its at the beginning of the hair curve. Select the hair curve, then the shape curve, click the loft options button and select polygons as the output type, and quads not triangles. Increase the isoparm # settings further down the option box until you get the right result. Then export as .obj into zbrush and use uvmaster to layout the uvs, unless you’re a comfortable maya uv mapper. Much faster in zbrush. Or you could append a zsphere ztool to your character model in zbrush and make zsphere hair. Both are fairly easy, id give more details but I’m away from my pc.