Real time hair creation in blender + hair tool addon ep3 ( Final fantasy 13)

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make real-time hair but thought to yourself, I can't do it because it must be difficult, then you are lucky my friend.
I am going to show you the breakdown of how I created this Lightning's hair from Final fantasy 13 Lightning returns, with a help of a hair tool addon. So go grab a cup of tea, and let's begin!
If you have any questions or constructive feedback, put them in the comment section. That would be really appreciated!
-Hair tool addon
bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/l/hairtool?recommended_by=library
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:35 Reference gathering
01:27 Hair block out
01:48 hair texture creation
02:38 Hair layer 0
09:38 scene clean-up
12:36 Hair layer 1
21:05 Hair layer 2
23:11 Hair optimization (game res)
23:31 Outro
-Music that is being used in the video
sweet-wedding-melody by Daddysmusic
happy-motivation-prpject-main by Daddysmusic
Ceremonial Library - Asher Fulero

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

If you have any questions, constructive criticisms, or tips you want to share, please share them here! and also if you have any project you are currently working on, let me know too! I'm interested in knowing what you guys are making.

[@wegotguns3325]

Dude, you get better every video, I cant wait to see what you do next. I have had hairtool since it was released but only started to get into it recently as I am working on characters for an indie horror game. Your tutorials and experience with it are a big help for me~

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

@@wegotguns3325 Aw thank you so much ! I have been learning a lot about real-time hair creation lately and developing my skills so I'm glad you can see the progress in my videos haha. I have so many hair styles I wanna recreate from the characters I love, so you can expect to see more and better tutorials on my channel in the future for sure!

[@wegotguns3325]

@@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358 -No worries, I can't wait to see your next video

[@wegotguns3325]

@@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358 Btw do you have an instagram or something where you post pictures of your stuff?

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

@@wegotguns3325 yeah of course! If you go to my channel page, you'll see the link to my both instagram and art station.

[@bit-studios1]

This is awesome!!! Thanks for taking the time to create this video. I am learning a lot from it. ❤️👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿🙌🏿

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

Aw Thank you Eric! I'm so happy that I am being able to help you out somehow hehehe I hope your learning process is going well :)

[@gaukhi2371]

thank you very much :D

[@xiaogaming3712]

Thank you for the tutorial, are you commissionning also mods too ? This FF Haircut with some change would be really good to have on my miqo'te :3 Thank you in advance !

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

Hey thanks Xiao! Actually I'm not at the moment since I have been trying to bring my skill level to much much higher degree to be good character artist but I'm really interested in participating in FF13 mod project in the future as I'm big fan of Lightning. So definitely in the future I will : )

[@sulphurous2656]

Just in time for my struggles on creating a particular hairstyle based off the information from a previous video. Studying hair cards from game models does generally help but man is creating the reference plains a pain sometimes.

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

yeah, I feel that... it can be extra pain for certain project definitely haha

[@sulphurous2656]

@@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358 I've been deducing as of late whether or not I should refocus on trying to use particle hair instead, since they give me promising results for the eyebrows/eyelashes (with only a basic material being applied). But the polycount is prohibitively expensive for use in a game engine, to the point where most of the polygon budget goes to the hair alone (21k verts for eyebrows/eyelashes alone in my case, then again it is my first attempt so it might not be that bad but relative to the rest of the model being around 26k verts in its entirety with noticeable polygons around the nose it is ludicrously expensive) which is a bit of a concern even though I'm doing something more realistic. So I'm tempted to just go back to cards instead or something similar and take advantage of the Hair Tool addon's functionality. And its compatibility with Blender's native particle hair. That'll take some time to figure out though. I might just be able to compensate with a different or higher resolution hair card texture instead in place of the stock texture, and find a way to swap the two in an existing session. I suppose the best thing you can do is just to try rather than not do anything at all and see what it produces.

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

@@sulphurous2656 you can definitely achieve hyper realistic result but it takes more care and effort. If you are having problem with making eyebrows, have you ever tried using interactive combing functionality? It is very easy to use and you can comb hair cards as if you are combing hair particles. and also you can save up polygons just by painting eyebrows on the face directly and add hair cards on it. it will help to create realistic eyebrows feeling without wasting too much poly on it.

[@sulphurous2656]

@@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358 Just got back after a few days. I did indeed test using the interactive combing/grooming function of the addon after learning how to do particle hair first. The problem is, it doesn't seem to work on my end. I've heard some people have this problem as well, where the hair cards simply do not generate when you select the option to enable interactive grooming. The only time I kind of got it to work was by going back into object mode, and then into particle mode again, selecting the option again, and then it would spit out the cards. The children and materials do not load in however unless I manually refresh them, by which point I can't edit the curves with the particle editor mode. I still haven't finished troubleshooting, so I'm considering just tracing the particle hair manually with planes one at a time and hope that I can somehow make the default texture/shader look somewhat decent.

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

@@sulphurous2656 hm, that's weird. It should be really straightforward and powerful tool so I might make a video about making hair, using interactive grooming some time in the future.

[@uzaygemisi1716]

How did you do eyelashes?

[@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358]

HI! I used hair tool eyelashes preset as a base, generated variations of clumps of eyelashes. set hair cards numbers low like 20, fill in the gaps manually by hand. if you just used fully procedural method, you won't be able to get good result.

[@uzaygemisi1716]

@@tomcreektomoyaogawa4358 Thank you