From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

Modeling hair using Curves - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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Modeling hair using Curves

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- [Instructor] I was inspired by Ethan Snell's amazing hair with curves tutorial. And while I'll give a brief overview of how to do it, I highly recommend you check out his work, because he offers an excellent overview on how to get those intricate hair details. So with that, let's just jump in. Now, first what you want to do, is delete this cube. Let's go ahead and switch the cycles. Let's add ourselves a subject, like a monkey. Smooth shading, there we go. Let's come over to modifier, subdivision. Now let's zoom in here. Click on the top of his head. Shift A curve bezier and you can hit R Y, 90. There you go. Plant that right on his head. And then shift A again. Add a circle this time, move it over here, click on this hair curve if you will. Put a bevel object, click on the circle. Tab, A twice to make sure everything is selected. Alt S, that's shrink and fatten, super handy little tool. Let's move this over here, maybe these are a little bit too big so you can go ahead and drag them down. There we go. Let's pick this again, alt S. Get really tight, alt S. Maybe come about here. There we go. That looks pretty good. Click down here on this point, shift S, cursor to select it. Tab out. And then hit spacebar, set origin. Set origin to 3D cursor, there we are. Still a little bit of space on this, so click on this point, alt S. Nice and tight. Alt s, there we go, cool. Now, scroll down a little bit, and we're looking for texture space, use UV for mapping, it's going to be important. Let's go ahead and add a new material really quick, I'll call it hair. Now, what we want to do is add a whole bunch of hair to this monkey, so I'm going to go to view top and then go to ortho, so that's shift D. Just go ahead and shift D and add a whole bunch of hair, and in my case I'm going to make a radical monkey. He's going to have himself a mohawk. Don't forget you can always hit B, select the box, shift D, RZ. Look at that. Shift D again, put them right in the middle, SY. That way you get a little bit of a difference. If you want to, you can also go to individual origins, rotate each of these individually. RZZ will get you something cool like that, and let's just shift D again. Just to have a little bit of a difference there. Maybe have these rotating the other way, there you go. Cool, now we have a mohawk grass monkey head kind of thing. Alright, now let's go ahead and make the material. If you don't already have node wrangler on, go to file user preferences, click on add ons, type in node wrangler, N O D E. Check it on, save user settings. It is super awesome. Now we need a couple of things here, first let's go ahead and add the texture coordinate, so shift A, shift A again, add a mapping, enter. Let's go ahead and add noise. And let's just go ahead and connect these, so, go to UV, factor, factor, come down to factor again. And you can control shift left click on noise texture, then go into material. And you can start to see what's happening here, start to get a little bit of like a noise, it may be helpful to switch to rendered mode, and go to GPU that way you can really see what's happening. So now what we want to do is scale this, to kind of get that nice... Fibrous hair like kind of pattern, that's pretty cool. There you go, that looks good. Kill this diffuse, bring this out over here, shift A. Let's go ahead and add color ramp, and let's go ahead and add a principle, we're going to put the principle right here, color ramp, you know our monkey's really radical, so we're going to go from red to like, click here, let's go to blue, because he is just out of control. And this factor to factor, color to color, control shift left click principle. Starts to look pretty cool, if you can't see it well enough, consider adding more light. So let's move this lamp over here, and if you can't rotate it, maybe switch it to an area, there you go. Use nodes. Rendered mode, or shift Z, hey, that's looking pretty cool. There you go. You can always make the size a bit bigger. That way it spills out a little bit more all over the place. Click on here, look at that wicked monkey, can hit shift A, add a bump, take the factor from here into the normal. Then take this normal and pipe it into normal again, now you'll start to get that really bumpiness but it's a little bit heavy. So maybe pull it back some. If it's not looking too good, you could always just kill it, too, but I'll leave it there just to add a little bit of like a, self shadowy bump. You can add a little bit of sub surface to the whole thing, so things kind of flow a little bit better together. And you can bring down the radius, so it's not too high, so, say point three. If that bump is still killing you, you can always just control F click, and just drag it to kill it. Actually it looks a little bit better without the bump so maybe we'll just let it go. And now the last cool thing we need to do, is fade away these tips. Now that is a little bit of a process, so let's go ahead and shift A gradient texture. Come all the way over here, grab this UV into vector. Shift A, let's add another color ramp. And drag the color to the factor. Control shift left click on color ramp, you'll start to get this kind of look here, so let's actually flip these. There we go. And then hit shift A, add a math. Put that right here. You're going to want to switch this to a multiply. And then take the factor, put it at the bottom. Now the reason why you want to do that, is so you can start to see these little edges here, grab another color ramp, shift D. There you go. And now here you can really start to pick what kind of edging that you want. So let's say that looks pretty good. Shift A, let's add a mix shader. We're going to put it right here. You can get rid of this viewer really quick. Take the color, pipe it into factor. Shift A, transparent. Plug it into the bottom. And then plug in this principle to the top. And it looks like I did it backwards, so let's just flip that really quick, there we go. Now you can start to see how they start to fray out like that. And if it's going a little bit slow for you, it's okay, it's a pretty demanding node, and there's a whole bunch of these being generated in real time and there you go, you now have a totally radical looking monkey. Like all things in Blender there are a million things you can do so I recommend you get in there and see what other shapes you can create using curves, and of course, this principle shader you could layer on even more things, like roughness, specular to make the hair really really pop. Get in there, have some fun, and until next time, this is David for Blender's tips tricks and techniques.

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