Hairstyle

I followed Adam Skutt’s technique of making hair cards, which can be found on his gumroad. The basic gist is that you make small planes in Maya and grow XGen Hair from those planes. Then you do an Arnold render from the front view to get the Hair Texture. You need different kinds of hairs to give you variation in length, thinness, or type (like eyelashes, eyebrows, stubble, etc.). As for the cards, I just manually placed them. Before this project, I had never used XGen, rendered with Arnold, or ever placed hair cards.

I was going for a light and soft “modern bob” hairstyle. That hairstyle involves a lot of hair strips that split up the outer surface and makes the hair feel light, which lends itself nicely to haircards! It really helps to include fly-away hairs or singular hairs that messily come off the head to add some realism. To finish it off, you have to surround your hair with a sphere and then project the normals onto your hair cards so they don’t look too much like cards (check the end of this tutorial). I’d also recommend giving your hair a bit of subsurface scattering in the render.