The Hair

Figuring out the shape of the hair was another challenge for me because I only had one view from the reference to work with. So I could only match it from that perspective. I had no idea what the back looked like so it took me several attempts of sculpting the hair to try and make it look plausible from all angles.

After finishing the sculpt and baking the low poly I painted a quick directional map in Krita to see how the anisotropic shading would affect the look of the hair. It worked pretty well but it was looking rather flat and It didn’t have that nice “zig-zag” specular effect you’d expect to see on the hair. So in order to create the effect I wanted I ended up adding more details in the normal map.

I didn’t want to move back to Zbrush so I hand painted every single strand using the lazy brush in substance painter instead. I’ve added a small increase in height to the light strands whilst giving a small decrease in height to the darker strands. After that I added a blur filter to blend the strands together with the rest. This process is rather tedious but it gave me the effect I was looking for and the end result ended up quite nicely.

Textures

When painting the textures in substance painter I use a lot of separate layers and I paint everything using masks rather than painting directly onto the layer itself. This is because hand painting and blending colors in substance painter doesn’t feel very natural to me like it does for example in Photoshop. It’s a cumbersome way of painting but the advantage is that it does allow me to change anything on the fly without having to alter the rest.

