need tip on tackling hair

[dmg3d]

Hi-

I'm planning to create some hair for my character, but I'm wondering what would be the best plan of attack.

The image below shows basically what I'm after. I'm using LW7.5 and Saslite.

I'm thinking I'll need to create the basic geometry for the body of hair and then use that as the basis to for the saslite hairs... Does that seem right? Or would it be worth the time to do it ALL in saslite? Would the full Sasquatch be able to do it all?

Thanks for any insight.
-Dave

[TerryFord]

That's quite an ambitious hair style, it might be worth trying some simple bob type hairstyles first to get a feel for sasquatch.

It might be theoretically possible to do hair like that in fur mode, but a saner approach would be to use long hair guides. The hair is shaped with curves (quite a lot of curves in this case) which then need to be frozen into 2-point poly chains (there are plugins to do this - check Flay.com or my website).

I'm not sure if Saslite includes the "Shadow of Sas" shader that you would need for this hair (it's a shader applied to the skin/clothing to render the shadows from the hair). I think you'd need the full Sasquatch version to do it properly.

Good luck :)


Regards,
Terry

[dmg3d]

Thanks Terry

What about the idea of creating some basic geometry... to kind of cheat... like in the B.S. days (Before Sasquatch)... rather than trying to create the whole "wig" with long hair guides, break the wig down into mutiple objects and create hair guides for each smaller object? Too much work? Or just crappy results? I dunno.

The character(s) are from the 30's/40's, so curves, waves, buns are gonna be the thing.

I've tried adding hair/fur in Saslite to balls and cubes, just to get a quick feel... and I think you're right about needing the full version. There just isn't the control in Saslite when working on something more complex. But I thought if I could get by with the above scenario... Majority of the examples I've seen do not show characters with actual "hair styles", usually just straight and long, short, and very short.

Obviously I haven't had much experience creating hair... so thanks again for the help.
-Dave

[Dodgy]

With that thick a set of locks, you probably would be best of doing the majority of the work with a poly object, with some overlayed saslite hair. If you want to try the full on wig, I wrote a little tute to show you the basics:

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/saslite/index.html

[dmg3d]

Thanks for the input Mike.

As a matter of fact, I used your tutorial already. Nice job! Very easy to follow... and it helped me get familiar with saslite quickly. Thanks.

-Dave

[Dodgy]

Why thank you :)