CC Hair

Over the summer, I started to watch Sims 4 youtubers which eventually lead to the less family friendly Sims 4 youtubers. Something I noticed that they shared was an interest in cc or custom content made by others in the Sims community. Upon looking at those who create custom content I found an interesting and simple technique they use for creating realistic hair. Here is a video from the youtuber MunchKin who uses blender to create these realistic hairstyles:

 


So essentially he uses realistic textures on a clear background to create hairs and then copies them and rotates them so the same texture is seen in all dimensions. This really interests me, especially since he seems to be doing it in blender render so I want to see if I am able to get the same effect and get it to appear nicely in a blender render. I will be using this secret model for a personal project to test this out.




For the stands of hair, the youtuber creates a plane and adds an image texture to the plane. Then he sets the image to UV. Then, in the materials tab, he goes to the section labeled “transparency”, checks it off and proceeds to set the alpha slider to 0.



Then, he goes to the textures tab to the section labeled “influence” and checks off the part that is also labeled “alpha” but does not slide it down to 0.



He then proceeds to position the hair to where he likes.

 In the end, this is what I got:

 Not rendered:



Rendered:



Overall I like the general appearance of the hair and how quick it was to create this look is definitely a good thing. However, I cannot see this working for everything I make. For example, I definitely think the way I made hair last year for my pieces worked well for them as they were more cartoon looking, but if I can imagine more realistic hair for a model this is definitely a good way to do that. 

Work Log:
Monday:No School
Tuesday:Texturing glasses and lighting
Wednesday:Texturing glasses and fortune cookies
Thrusday:Rendering glasses, crystal, and character
Friday:Rendering and texturing fortune cookies