Hair

When the thinking process started to begin for the hair, i had to figure out a few things. I thought about trying to make real strands of hair, but with a little research looked very time consuming, difficult and would make the data file rather large which would slow down rendering time. As i wanted my character to be stylized, i started looking into other methods and found such a great tutorial which was so interesting to watch, not just because of the technique but his character was so interesting. It was also something that i had learned since this unit, which was using extrude.

The video which helped me do this part was: http://lesterbanks.com/2010/05/maya-stylized-character-modeling-tutorial-creating-hair/

To start with i went round the base of the head by selecting the faces so that i could figure out the hair lining, i done a rough set up as a guide and extruded that to start showing signs of hair.

Here is what it started to look like, as you can see it looks a little like a bowl hair cut. If i were doing a boy, then modeling the hair would have been a lot easier.

Once i started to play around with the vertex, i noticed how i needed to start pulling the vertex out instead of just down to start shaping a fringe. But once i started to try and pull them out, the face started to deform and mess up the geometry, i was unclear on why this was happening, i tried a few things but nothing was working, so i went back to researching and found out the problem. The issue was that i needed to go onto mesh and use extract which separated the hair from the head, so i now had two objects. I never knew i could do that and would not have found this out if i had not researched. From then i was able to shape the fringe again with no problems.



Now that the fringe has started to take shape i could see how my character was coming along. I still have a lot of reshaping to do and making it smoother but i can confidently say that i can do this. Without video tutorials, there is no way i would have been able to get half as far as i have.