Cutting and combing the hair

- I think it's time to give this poor kid a better hairdo. So let's begin by bringing in a couple of those images just to remind us what the original drawing looked like. I'm just going to open this up just a bit and then I will come over here to the corner and click in drag and drag that down. And also I'll go back to that corner and click and drag this way. So we get two images. Here are two windows for our images. I'll go to an image editor here, click image open. And let's go into the reference images. I'll choose this one for the front, just so we can get an idea of kind of what we're going for. Even if it isn't going to be exactly the same. Let's switch to an image editor here and then go to image open here. And let's bring in that a side view right here. Just so we have something to look at while we're combing the hair here. In addition, I think maybe I'd like to reduce the length just a little bit more. Let me go back to the particles panel here. And instead of 0.2, let's try 0.1. Oh, that's a little bit too short. How about 0.15? Yeah, I think that feels okay. Let's go with that. I don't want it to be too big off his head here. But I think this might work. All right, so now let's come over to our mode, pull down menu and switch from object mode to particle edit. And when we do that, we get this. We can't really see his hair anymore. And this isn't a bad way to groom the hair if your viewport is really slowing down. But I want to at least begin with the hair in the viewport. So I'm going to come back over here to the Active tools tab. And if we twirl down the options here, we've got a little check box called children. And you can see it says display actual particles. So, if we turn that on and we can see it again. All right, well, here in the particle edit, we've got some tools here. We can comb the hair. I come over here and click and drag here and see I can just kind of comb the hair like this. I'm going to undo that. This is the smooth brush, which if you try it here, you aren't going to be able to see a whole lot happening here, until we comment a little bit more. But we also have the ad rush, which you can actually add new children or particles into the hair. The length of brush, you can actually grow the hair a little bit longer, like that. And you have the puff brush which kind of puffs the hair back out after you've calmed it down. And of course the Cut tool here. So I'm going to begin with the Cut tool and I'm going to kind of go here to the front of the character. And I want to cut this area here. You can see that the sideburns here are a little bit shorter. So with my strength at 100, I can also hit the F key and make this bigger or smaller and Shift + F to change the strength. But I think I'll just come in here and click and drag and drag up like this. Oh, also let's go ahead and turn off the X mirror. It doesn't mirror when you're cutting but it can mirror on the other brushes. So let's go ahead and turn that off now. Okay, I'm over here and let's cut this part right here. And we're just kind of cleaning up the side here, just a bit like that. Also back here, let's trim this a bit. We don't need that here. Behind the head. Kind of like that, all right. And then what let's do is let's come back to the comb brush. I've got it here at 50% and let's see what we can do with this. I'll hit the F key and move that out just a bit and make that just a little bit bigger. And when you're combing, it's really good to do it on the edges. If you try and do it straight in here, let me see if I can show you here. Try and go straight in on the side here, like this. That's what you're going to get. It's going to make more of an indentation and actually comb it. So what I've found is that if you come on the edges like this without going straight into the middle of the hair, it tends to work a little better. All right, let me undo this. There we go. Now I'm just going to begin pulling, you can see I've got kind of a part here. I'm going to begin pulling these out. So we have just a bit of a, kind of a hint of a part there, right there. And then I'm also going to begin curling over a bit. And I want to swoop it back toward the back of the head. So to do that, once again, I'm going to tilt it so I can just see the edges of it and begin moving it back like this. You really have to do it kind of in small increments. And I'll get this here. Just trying to move that back like that. Now, as you spin around here, you can see we've got this kind of gray white area. And that's really the specularity of the material. If we came back over here to the materials panel and with the hair materials selected, we really just need to turn down the specular here. So if we turn that down a bit, you can see it get a little bit darker. and maybe I'll bring the roughness up some. There we go. That gets rid of some of that gray that's happening when see it at an odd angle. All right, let me begin brushing this back a bit. And I have to say right up front here, I am not a hair designer so you can probably do this much better than I can. I am certainly not a trained hairstylist by any means. He's got a little bit of a hair going forward here. So I'm going to try and put that there. And then I'm going to begin pulling some of this back like this. You have this works. And once again, just keep tumbling around and comb along the edges, right. Don't try and comment right in the center of the hair. Just do it along the edges. All right, let's go around on the other side here and let's begin doing the same thing here. Once again, combing along the edges. Maybe if I can move these in bit like this. There we go. Yeah, we're getting there. Let me go back here and take a look. Now I think I'm going to need more light in the back as I work on the back of the head here. So I may just duplicate that area light and move it back here. Let me see. Let's go back to object mode, turn on the extras here. And then I'm going to grab this area light, press Shift + D and Enter. Then I'll press G Y and move that back here like this. And maybe I'll move it up and then I'll grab this and drag it over to his head like that. Just so I can see the back a little bit better. Yeah, I think that'll help, okay. Let's now turn off the extras again and keep combing this kid's hair. Now, I feel like we need to cut some of the hair back here. It's a little too long now that we've kind of combed it down. So let's go back to the cut brush and let's see what we can do here. I think I'll just take this and cut it down like this. And the same thing over here. Let's see how that works. Better, but I still feel like we could get a little bit more here. Here we go. Let's turn it around and see how we're doing. Maybe a little bit of combing back here. Well, let's hit F 12 and see how it looks. Not too bad. I'm thinking about increasing the number of particles here. Let's go back to the particle tab here and write down here this 30 and 30. I wonder what would happen if we increase that a bit. Let me go back to object mode here and let's take this 30 up to 50. Let's say. Yeah, that's kind of nice. Let's take this up to 50 and let's take a look at it in the render view. I'll hit F 12. Yeah, that's kind of nice. I think I'll leave it there for now. That looks pretty good. I'm not real happy with the sideburns. And the problem I've seen here is that the Cut tool really doesn't give you that fine of detail to make the sideburns that much cleaner. We can come down here to the roughness area and we can reduce the roughness here. We could take, instead of 0.075, I'm just going to take it down to zero and see how it looks. And you can see now things are a little bit cleaner. So it really just depends on how much randomness you want in this. Let's take it up to 0.01 and see how that works. Yeah, 0.02. So I may bring it up to 0.05, again. I feel like, I like that amount of randomness to it. I kind of liked that. So anyway, that is how to groom and cut your character's hair. Once again, I apologize that I'm not more of a hairstylist but I'd love to see the kind of results you can get from these tools as well. All right, in the next video, we're going to work on a similar process for just creating the eyebrows. And once we do that, then we'll be ready to rig the character for animation.