Challenges

In my personal opinion, real-time hair is probably the most challenging and labor intensive part of a real time character to get right and to do well. Even with great tools like xgen, which help a lot with texture creation and the amazing advances in shaders, which help a lot to achieve great looking results, it still takes a lot of time to construct the hair from hair cards in a convincing way. This type of challenge is best overcome by carefully planning your approach from the beginning to reduce the amount of times you might have to redo anything, which is definitely going to happen at some points no matter what. Scheduling yourself and spreading out the workload over a period of time can help a lot too if you have that luxury.

First, the individual cards are combined and setup as hair clumps consisting of 2-3 cards each. Start out by creating an opaque base layer blocking in the overall structure and flow of the hair carefully following the references, while being sure to get good coverage over the scalp of the character’s head. Then begin laying down a breakup layer using less opaque cards following the general flow and structure of the base layer, but still looking for places to breakup the flow of the base layer based on your references. While laying down cards, it’s important to be mindful and keep the number of edge loops in your cards to a minimum, only adding edges where necessary to accommodate the bending and twisting of the hair cards. This helps to minimize the number of vertices to what is necessary and minimizes the impact on the framerate in the game.