By the time the hair was to be created, myself and Jake were slightly ahead of Dan R, so it was our job to see if our plan to create hair would be successful. As I’ve already written about in a previous post, we had decided that the way foreword with the hair was to use a combination of Zbrush, Photoshop and Mudbox. The plan was to build the volume of the hair up in Zbush, bump on the chunky strands of hair and apply basic texture in Mudbox and then clean it all up in Photoshop.
We had used Zbrush once in a previous project a year ago, where we had taught ourselves the programme. It was difficult software to learn and I was worried that I wouldn’t remember how to use it. Luckily it seems that after struggling to learn a programme, its difficult to forget it. Creating the hairstyle in Zbrush was interesting, as I kept creating a massive milk maid hairstyle for some reason!
Once I had got a hairstyle that I felt I would be able to work with, I took the subdivisions right down in zbrush to keep the model low poly and exported the model to Maya. I soon realised however, that our devised plan would need some work. Bumping on the creases in Mudbox didn't look as effective as I'd hoped and making the design look presentable was taking myself and Jake on our different models, more time than I felt comfortable with. Time was slipping and we needed a way to make the hair look good, fast.
After watching two episodes of '24' with Dan C for an inspirational break, as creating the hair was beginning to stress me out, I came up with the idea to paint the highlights on in Mudbox and then use that texture map to create a bump map in Photoshop. Together we created a rough test to see if this was feisable. The plan worked, allowing our group a method to create chunky hair, in a much faster way.
When creating the bunchy, I constructed the shape in Maya, Mudboxed it as I had done with the top of her hair and brought it into Photoshop, only to find that the save button wouldn’t work! I had never even considered this as a possibility of happening, but nothing would save! I searched online for help, and found that this had happened to other people, but their various methods of fixing the problem wouldn’t work for me. I dragged poor Jake over and made him reinstall Photoshop for me, but to no avail. Nothing would save. In a last attempt I searched online again and found a blog entry where there was another method of fixing this problem. This time it worked! All I had to do was to uncheck a simple button. Haha.. ahhh. These projects wouldn’t be the same without these sorts of things happening.
The blog of wonder:
http://howardgrill.blogspot.com/2007/09/fixing-photoshop-cs3-crashes-when.html
With the bunchy and the top of her hair complete, I created a hairband and a headband and moved onto creating the fringe.
Wow, if I thought I had come across stress so far, it was nothing compared to her fringe!
I created her fringe the same way in which I had created the rest of the hair. However, this did not produce the effect I was looking for as it was so blunt with no choppy strands of hair at the bottom that it looked stuck on.
Dan C suggested creating an alpha map. This turned out to be rather tricky to get looking right, and so I produced lots of undesired results some which can be seen below :)
Finally, after a long night, I got the fringe looking how I wanted it to :D yay!
It wasn't only me who had had trouble with the hair. Jake had spent a long time working on his too. The images that Jake sent me to look over were good, but not completely what I was imagining in my head. Please see Jakes blog to view some of his hair tests. I felt the bunchys appeared too puffy and the hair on the back of her neck to be too long. I told Jake how I felt, and he was realy great at trying to get the hair, more to my vision.
An image Jake sent me of the hair looking alot more to shape, and a really quick digram I drew on the left to help:
The hair still looked a little too bulky from the side view, so I made a few alterations.
Just like I had struggled with the alphaed fringe, so had Jake. The tests that he had shown me, indicated that he was having trouble getting the alpha to shape the fringe out of an Elvis sideburn shape and the textures for her hair were not as flowing as I would like. Jake took my amendment requests really well, especially as I know I am a bit of a perfectionist, but time was ticking and I needed Jake to begin work on the grass in the graveyard. I assigned Jake to begin work on the graveyard grass and retextured Kittys hair myself, and built a new fringe, also using Lee's hairbands to keep continuity between the models.
Jake original hair and alpha map challenges:
The above images show the hair very dark. With light reflecting off of the specular map (here the bump was used again) the hair can be seen to have more tone in the final film :) This can already be seen if you click on the image to enlarge.
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