My next step at giving some dimension to the hair is to add strands of hair that appear independent of rest of the head. For this I used the new Convert To Main feature that has been added to the Zsphere tool. After selecting the Zsphere tool, I went down to Rigging where I pressed Select to choose the hair base ztool I just finished working on.
Go to Topology and press Edit Topology. You can now click across the hair base where you want the strands to flow. When finished with a strand, I typed e (scale) and went back to click on the parent zsphere again to reselect it and then typed q (draw) to redraw a couple more strands from the origin.
When I was ready to start shaping the strands, I pressed Convert to Main under Topology. Now unpress Edit Topology and the zsphere strands should appear.
To get them to appear thicker than what they are, press Scale and then hold down the Alt key while you click and drag to the right on the zsphere stem that lies between the first and second zsphere. This should grow the branch without scaling the zsphere's positions. You will now want to scale individual zspheres to taper the size you see fit as well as move in and out of the hair base
To cut the strands loose from the parent, Alt+q click on the stems that lead the parent zsphere to the strands. When you are ready to append the strands to the rest of the head, go to Rigging
and press Delete and the zspheres will now be added to the Subtools.
Once the zsphere hair strands are added to the subtools, you can refine the integration of the strands with the rest of the subtools. The LazyMouse was a key player in carving lines down the curving strands. Don’t forget to use the
ReplayLast stroke feature for emphasis and further definition of strokes you liked. Here’s an image to help see a process that helped define the hair strands.
Steps 1 and 3 are tool preparation steps. Step 2 works best if applied in a single stroke. On that note, step 4 works best if the model is not moved at all since step 2. Step 5 will help even out the mesh from all the pinching but should leave the newly created creases when the Smooth slider is set to higher than 50 (try 100 first).
I hope this walk through will help give insight to some of the new features in the latest version of ZBrush. Please post any insights or improvements you may have found as I too am still learning. Good luck with your future creations!
