How do people make hair, which way is more efficient, using maya shave and a haircut plugin? or is it better to use planes and hair texture + alphas?
alot of different ways… depends on your style or what your studio requires, there are a couple ways i know about making hairs:
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use zsketch to build up the form of your hair and sculpt them. You can see the end result from Ryan Kingslien’s newest zb-gallery work.
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using 3d hair from maya/max/xsi for photo realistic result… But it can be pretty heavy on your rendering.
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using plane to build up your hairs, and then put textures on them to make them look like hair. Most video game models use this method because you can animate the hair to certain degree without getting too heavy on your rendering time. The final result would look like the uncharted models from naughty dog, which is also viewable from zb gallery.
as for me, i will usually just sculpt the hair from zbrush unless i want to make a gaming model.
Here’smy method to quickly sketch hair in ZB. Then I’d retopo and use Slash3 at various brush sizes etc to refine the look for sculpted hair or draw poly-strips/splines onto the mesh in Maya to use with Maya Hair or Shave.
Cheers!
there is a lot in Tutorial thread. maybe you can check it out?