Hair Modeling

For the hair I used the Hair and Fur system inside 3ds Max. This part of image was fun but also very hard to do because the hair consisted of 12 layers, and it took me almost two weeks to get it all done. The shaping of the hair and beard was the hardest part to carry out because of all those curly shapes. The rest of the layers represent the clusters above and behind the ear and the additional hairs like those on the suit (Fig.04a – b).


Since I used a high resolution head model for the render I needed to export the lowest subdivision level model from ZBrush and cut out only necessary polygons for my scalp model. I used the spline modeling method as I think this is the best way of modeling when it comes to hair. The placeholder hair that I made in ZBrush helped me a lot because I projected guide splines onto it with the help of the Snap to Surface tool, which is under the Freeform tab in the Graphite modeling tools (Fig.05a – 5c).




After snapping the splines to the surface they needed to be simplified by deleting the unnecessary vertexes and tweaking the rest to get the desired form. When I was satisfied with the form I just played a little with the kink, frizz and multi-strand parameters, which make hair look much more realistic. As for the hair shader I only used a texture for the density and tweaked the default settings.

Texturing

For some time now I have been using headus UV layout when unwrapping my objects. It's an unbelievably smart and quick program, and also very easy to use. I used Zapplink for the texturing and had very good reference images that I took in the studio that I'm currently working in. It is very important to use good reference images with no baked specular because it really helps to improve the final result (Fig.06a - c).