Here's Everything To Know About Hair Cards

The first 500 people to use my link will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/borocg12231
If you like my horror game development process, you can support it on my Patreon page: / borodante
Support Ukraine:
razomforukraine.org/donate/ - Razom For Ukraine, donate for medical aid using PayPal etc.
help.unicef.org/ukraine-emerg... - UNICEF, support children of Ukraine.
Chapters:
00:00 - What's Coming
02:53 - 3D Sketch
13:52 - 3D Hair Cards (First Attempt)
22:26 - 2D Hair Cards
51:48 - Final Result
1:03:13 - Better 3D Hair Cards
Music:
Coffeehouse by Large - Matt Large.mp3
Llévame Lejos de Aquí - Matt Large.mp3

[@BoroCG]

Hope you guys like this 1-hour journey! And thank you Skillshare for sponsoring me. The first 500 people to use my link will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/borocg12231

[@doorknob7420]

john was bald for so long i thought you were making him in your image

[@judgsmith]

Yeah so did I

[@guruprasadh_j]

Yeah! I came to comment the same 😅. I really love tutorial but want bald john to play.😂

[@BoroCG]

Will be a free dlc :D

[@guruprasadh_j]

@@BoroCG Noice..🔥

[@oddur_arg]

Same!

[@IAMXVE]

This video is superb. I know it’s not necessarily a tutorial, but it really helped me understand the process of hair cards and hair overall within Blender. Watching your dev process is really inspiring. Thanks for sharing!

[@BoroCG]

Glad I'm helpful!

[@LautaroLosio]

Great work as always! It's amazing to see how well you can transition through the many different branches of digital art. I was thinking you should apply a base color to the base of the head so that it appears more full. Many games suffer from that "detached" hair style. The hair looks really good, but the fact that the base is the same color as the face is odd. It's also good for faking the AO that the hair should cast on the head.

[@bobross9370]

You can use the normal map matcap and render the image from viewport, it will give you far better normals, the normals you currently have look very off. You could also rotate the hair cards 15-20 degrees towards the camera when rendering, it will make the bottom falloff quite a bit less sharp. Projecting hair onto the hair shell would require you to flatten the shell out, maybe with a shape key, make sure the UV's are the exact same shape as the flattened mesh by projecting from view, and render the hair with an emissive material, then you can simply line it up.

[@BoroCG]

Thanks, I talk about matcap in the final chapter

[@adriank8792]

I went through this exact process a while ago. To thin down the extruded hair curves, go to edit more, enable proportional editing, select the tips and scale the curves down to desired thickness using alt+s. Play with the radius of the circle of influence until you get the result you're looking for. After that, I converted the hair curves to a mesh and exported them to Substance for baking

[@3Mever]

Great Video and awesome workflow,could use a texture for the scalp(short hair) so it will look better and that will help with having less hair cards and still look good.Cheers!

[@MaxWithTheSax]

I would definitely be curious how the normal mapped hair looks on the character. Maybe it would be worth using the normal maps generated from the curve geometry even though then ends are not nicely tapered just to try it out.

[@BoroCG]

I might replace all the cards' textures to 3D hair tenders when I'll have the time

[@sebemmelembro2172]

1:06:13 If I'm not mistaken, this is actually quite simple to do, you can use a curve to control the thickness of another curve, this control curve will have one end representing the root and another representing the tip, so if you make an arc with the curve, for example, you will have an object that is thin at the ends and thick in the middle

[@bartoszstyperek6306]

That trick with 'do scale mipmaps' is awesome. I had so many questions about it, but I do not use UE. Now I know. Thanks

[@UKXcalibur]

it looks awsome!!

[@Ironpants57]

Cloth brush for hair cards?! Why does it work so well, lol? It feels pretty easy to use. Also to pair it with the pose brush with cloth simulation is super awesome! Though wish the pose brush could use collisions.

[@AllExistence]

The reason why tangent looks like a normal map and normal map is not it's because normal maps are saved in tangent space, which is basically means tangent to surface. Otherwise, you normally are world space or object space and will change with rotation and deformation of the object. If you wish to use raw normal, don't feed it into normal map node. That's why it's so sharp. P.S. Currently you normals only look correct from one side, as seen in the video.

[@BoroCG]

Oh cool thanks! Will try this

[@dangray]

Super interesting.

[@Gustmazz]

He kinda reminds me of a mix of James from Silent Hill and Ethan from RE7. Fantastic work! And thank you for such an awesome tutorial!

[@Mandollr]

Xnormal really great and easy software for baking hair

[@jowski3073]

Thanks for the nice series! I use the normal matcap and render a viewport rendering with all overlays switched off! Worked fine so far ;)

[@BoroCG]

Thank you! Yeah I cover the matcap method at the end, but it doesn't seem to work with hair curves very well. And then there's a bunch of problems with the conversion to a mesh

[@jowski3073]

I usually render the haircard like you in the beginning, and then use the matcap render from the same camera to get a pbr set

[@isabear478]

I was thinking that about the clotg brush being useless

[@JesusIsRealJ1247]

As a tip, don't render lighting on your hair albedo. Just let that be the breaking of color by depth. You certainly could have used the particle hair instead of hand painting them. Just bake down the color of the material, the gloss/roughness, and normal's and you'd be good. Anything else, you could do shader edits, and post-comps of those textures.

[@Moonguy13]

These dev vlogs are always great❤i just little bit miss process of sculpting neonites❤❤

[@BoroCG]

I kind of miss that too. I'll look for a way to get some kind of recurring series on sculpting

[@paulomag2106]

Hey, Boro, maybe you've seen his videos/tutorials already, but check out Kent Trammel's work. He's very thorough and goes quite deep into realism when it comes to any part of modeling, texturing, etc... His hair tutorials are great.

[@ebelesaurus2]

for normals on haircards, you can get just turn on normal matcap in t he viewport shading settings

[@sebemmelembro2172]

22:03 The most correct option in this situation would, probably, be to bake using the hair as high and the scalp mesh as low, then you would bake the opacity, normal, height.... I use substance painter for this because I like to make other changes with these maps later, but you can use marmoset or xnormal which are free and very good (although the program seems a bit abandoned)

[@yalcinment.]

good job, If you are still wondering about the normal map problem, let me explain, the normal and tanjet socket you use in the shader belongs to the the curve object data in 3d space, it has nothing to do with the two-dimensional uv map, also matcap uses a fast but not very accurate algorithm, I would not recommend it. Create a flat plane above and below the hair curves and bake the top one using cycles engine, this is most accure way to do it or use xnormal, as a bonus, if you bake the normal map into a 4K 32-bit texture and then reduce the resolution in Photoshop, the result will be perfect, just make sure to change the color space.

[@gabocavallaro]

Hey amazing video! And really usefull tip the cloth brush!, one quick question which mode of the cloth brush are you using? the default "drag" one? I tryed the other ones like snake hook or grab but they separate the cards, thanks in advance

[@bennyweimer2345]

if you select a vertex in a beveled curve you can scale it with alt s. you can use this to taper the ends of each hair strand.

[@BoroCG]

Thanks, it was very helpful. I actually knew this, but the main problem was to select all the tips automatically somehow. And I found a command for that in the edit mode! (Select -> (De)Select Last) After that, you use Proportional Editing (soft selection), and check Connected Only. Then it's just a matter of Alt+S (or clicking with Radius tool), and making those tips thinner, while using a scroll wheel to adjust the falloff radius

[@Tranoiz]

Wouldn’t it be best to have a texture of the hair blended into the main texture maps of the head so if you get glimpses of the scalp in unreal it won’t be recognisable that it’s just a bold white head underneath? I don’t know if that made any sense. Sorry I may have over complicated my wording.

[@pinchopaxtonsgreatestminds9591]

It's great to find this hair type tutorial without expensive packages like MAYA.

[@darkalleywaystudio3975]

This is the one thing I have been putting off for so long myself. It's a first person game, so not that big of a deal. However, I know it will be a tedious process once I'm ready to finally add hair to my character 😂

[@AllExistence]

In this episode: Bald man shows us how to take care of your hair.

[@mattwu7884]

Xgen is probably you could have for hair stuff. Way more control and much better quality.

[@AbaddonAlmighty]

The tornado area is called the crown.

[@kylejennings819]

the tornado area is actually called a calic The crown is the top of the head, as in where a crown would go

[@pardismack]

for short hair, you need to check the "Shell texturing" technique.

[@someuser4166]

The tornado things are called cowslick

[@wegotguns3325]

Dunno if anyone has mentioned it, but fibershop works pretty good for making hair cards easily.

[@AllExistence]

What is your add some subtle shader-based movement to take wind in the hair?

[@BoroCG]

Yeah, I'm planning to do either that or even adding some shape keys or even bone-based animation to certain thin parts of the hair

[@TiagoTiagoT]

Looking at Wikipedia, seems the more generic term for the swirly bit is a "hair whorl"

[@5641616341485]

I use hair cards but for the life of me I can't get hair coming out like that. I get stands of paper that are a place holder for the mesh and can't be seen from the side

[@skyboundbull]

Hair tornardos are called 'crowns'. =D The finer your hair is the more pronounced they are and will cause things like "Cow-licks". More coarse or dense hair types you won't notice them. I have 2 ugh... so my hair is always standing straight up in the back =/

[@AllExistence]

I think you would want to render in Raw or XYZ instead of Standard.

[@infinitesimotel]

Mmmm very H R Giger looking altar design there, and that s a compliment.

[@TiagoTiagoT]

I've seen the swirly bit called a "cowlick"

[@BoroCG]

Hair crown, someone said

[@haydenhoes12]

6:38 as a native english speaker, i also dont know what its called in english

[@FrozenInIce]

alpha textures costs performans so I use anime style and make it so the characters have 1 texture they share so calling is low and is not costing me performans.

[@badfitz66]

There's actually ways you can generate the hair cards using the geonodes-based hair. Might be worth looking into? kzbin.info/www/bejne/pn-TdqN4j5uZZ8U

[@DonyBit]

Maybe the hairs looked flat 'cause you were in orthographic mode. I don't know for certain. Just a guess, could be totally wrong

[@wilted_kale]

BoroGod'nte

[@user-nn6bb8hc7r]

About nothing. "I did it, I did it." How did you do it? Teaching material in scraps. Why give out something like this to show how amazing you are on half the screen? Where's the specifics, bro?

[@BoroCG]

I'm sorry you feel this way. I'm really not sure what I haven't shown in the video, and everyone else seem to have no such problem? I showed the process of creation of the hair cards and how I applied them on the head, as well as several alternative ways of doing it. Not sure what else I was supposed to demonstrate

[@AllExistence]

I think skin looks the worst right now.

[@BoroCG]

Haha well I didn't do the skin at all and it was only completely ruined when exporting to blender so please don't pay attention to the skin in Blender