Blender Hair System: Step-by-Step Tutorial

[@ireneahlberg7491]

Great tutorial. I find some of the basics of the hair system a bit unintuitive, but this really helped.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Great to hear!

[@shadetec13]

Great job dude!!!

[@sebastiangaleanoramirez9145]

Great tuturial, perfect to start learning about hair

[@saintelmo5590]

Great tutorial. Well done. Now, on Blender's part, this system would be great if you could generate hair cards from this without a metric crap ton of geometry node use. I mean, some dude figured out how to do this with a costly add on called Hair Tools. Surely the Blender guys can figure this out so that folks can do it for free.

[@MrPaulowillians]

I'm having trouble getting these meshes together and when moving the original mesh when move it in the shapekeys. Is it easy to attach this base emitter to the base mesh of the head? Thank you!

[@junior.hamilton]

Very good, very very good.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Thank you very much, very very much :)

[@MVWDave]

Great tutorial. Very helpful.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Glad it was helpful!

[@johnmorris3972]

HELP! I'm all good with adding hair, to a DAZ character, using 'Empty Hair', and it does look good, until I go to 'Rendered View'. Although, it looks fine in 'EEVEE', but looks like rope, in Cycles. Am I missing something in the original 'Settings' or is there a way to correct this for Cycles? I would use the 'Thickness' Modifier, but this is not an option in the Modifier section for 'Hair'. TIA.

[@xd1845]

Thanks!

[@AbeLeal3D]

No problem!

[@paparallada]

How can i use a image texture or weight paint for a radius thickness control?

[@paparallada]

How can I make this have dynamics?

[@MVWDave]

Thanks for the great tutorial. When you create the separate piece of mesh to attach your hair curves to, do you do anything special to that mesh once you separate it? In your tutorial, the separate mesh is somewhat simple, but if you were, for instance, creating hair for a character, would you UV unwrap the new piece? Change the relations in any way? I'm creating a character, and though I know I can't animate the hair to move like hair does (not yet available in Blender), I'd like the hair to move along with the character. I'm wondering how I accomplish that if the mesh the hair is attached to is a separate item. Any info you can give would be appreciated. Thank you.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Those meshes are called scalps and are usually just hidden a millimeter beneath the surface of the object. That way they are not visible but sill serve the purpose of "holding the hair". In character they then get transfered the weight of a rig to deform in the same way as a character

[@MVWDave]

@@AbeLeal3D Thanks so much. So you just Shift D to duplicate those faces. No other transforms?

[@AbeLeal3D]

@@MVWDave yeah you can just extract then normally and go from there,

[@MVWDave]

@@AbeLeal3D Thanks again. I appreciate the help.

[@balajiswastika6448]

Blender file export in 3Ds max the material quality was done not good. My work is hard surfaceing modelling . For example I give silver colour material making in a blender .but I export into 3DS Max only material colour objects only when I see it. The blender result does not match it.the silver colour reflection specular and does not show it .please help me out with this problem I know you have busy time so please help me

[@sonic26000]

If the Principled Hair BSDF does not appear, make sure you are in the Cycles render engine, and not Eevee

[@fellipeoliveira3d]

How can I use this new hair system in an animation production? How do I do a physical simulation with this new system?

[@AbeLeal3D]

they system is relatively new so there are still some things to polish, i need to check the new updates for Blender 4.0 but i will revisit this topic soon

[@oneartist3191]

i have a question , it is possible to apply force field in this curves

[@AbeLeal3D]

I'm not completely sure I'm gonna have to research a little bit more since there have been some update to version 4. But if they work similar to curves in Mayas Xgen then yes it should be possible to affect then with fields

[@DrTheRich]

btw, hair doesn't actually thin over it's length, it's the same thickness all the way through.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Do you mean in this type of helmets or in human hair? Cause in human hair it definitely does split and thin out from being exposed to the environment. It might not be as drastically depending on the type of hair and length but it definitely tapers at the tip

[@DrTheRich]

@@AbeLeal3D en general, hair is mostly the same more or less thickness throughout, and maybe has a little tip on the end (where it started growing) if it was never cut by scissors or broken. But hair on a helmet like this would definitely have been cut to get it all to a nice length. Doesn't matter if it's animal hair or not. If you make hair that tapers linearly from base to the tips, it looks off, and way to thin and sharp. It's a common mistake with 3d hair i see a lot. Hair grows like pushing a piece of pasta through a spaghetti machine. It's not like a grass blade.

[@blackswan6386]

thanks for the tutorial. let me allow one question. to make this export into fbx i just have to " convert into mesh" or is there something special ? ciao

[@AbeLeal3D]

That is an excellent question. Hair is actually not geometry but curves. So you have 2 options. If you need geometry for whatever reason you first need to convert it to geometry, and you will get a result similar to fiber mesh inside of ZBrush. However nowadays games can work directly with curves thru a special format called alembic. So you can export this curves into an alembic file and then use them inside of unreal for instance

[@iris89936]

I am having such a hard time. I'm just trying to put one strand of hair on it and it somehow makes it in to two. So every strand of hair I put on there are two on top of each other and I can not figure out why. I put my count to one and made a new object to see if it has to do with my object or something and the same happens...

[@AbeLeal3D]

hey Iris, it is a little bit difficult to help you without seeing the scene but feel free to jump in our discord and post some screenshots in the help channel

[@leosilboz]

I'm having two problems! I can't cut the hair without deleting it all, and when I try to add "Interpolate Hair" and connect it to the object, nothing happens. Somebody?

[@AbeLeal3D]

Send your question in our discord community's help room - discord.com/invite/Fcd5BjD7wN

[@agentshadow6618]

I need to know how to export to unreal engine

[@sidekick3rida]

Does this method support physics?

[@fantasticfilms7500]

Would you prefer this over xgen? Really been stuck on trying to decide if I should just stick with blender or go to Maya since it's industry standard.

[@AbeLeal3D]

Great question, i did a short not to long ago explaining that the main difference is where you want to work, for big studios and movies Maya would be the way to go right now and therefore XGEN would be my pick. For indie stuff blender is amazing. In the studio i currently own and where we develop VR expriences we use Blender for most of the stuff and Maya for animation

[@fantasticfilms7500]

@@AbeLeal3D Gotcha. Thanks for the response. The only confusion I have about Maya is I've seen videos of rig animation. But I've searched KZbin for full animation scenes made in Maya (Like Blender Charge short) and never see anything. Is it able to produce 3D scenes like Blender? Or are characters & meshes animated in Maya and brought into another program like Unreal? I'll check out your video

[@AbeLeal3D]

@@fantasticfilms7500 Yes of course! you might not find shorts like that due to the fact that movies use so many other softwares all disney and pixar films are done with Maya for instance

[@AbeLeal3D]

Blender however is an excellent way to see if 3D is your thing, i have some beginner level videos here in the channel you can check and start learning to get a feel of the pipeline

[@yumri4]

While watching your video doing the method you said to do which the last 3 videos also explain in the same way worked unsure why probably as i looked closer at yours and didn't do anything you didn't do while only doing what you did do

[@AbeLeal3D]

hey my friend, i am not sure if i understand your question, could you rephrase it?

[@yumri4]

@@AbeLeal3DTrying to say how you laid out the steps was in a way i understood. I thank you for that.

[@mrajesh6983]

can you do xgen tutorial video?

[@AbeLeal3D]

yeah of course! will upload soon!

[@mrajesh6983]

@@AbeLeal3D thanks teacher ♥️

[@Kim-uu8fc]

When I go into Sculpt Mode there is no Add Brush. I only see the old traditional sculpting tools for meshes. Waste of time on Blender 3.6 and above. Looks for another tutorial.

[@niCksOU-v5q]

Sculpt Mode shoud be used on Curve object.

[@Osvaldsson]

A recycled a flipped normals tutorial with the most basic info from other blender hair tutorials…