Introduction

Hey everyone, my name is Ellie Porfyridou, I am from Greece and soon to be graduate from Howest Digital Arts and Entertainment in Belgium.

During my studies I have worked on various projects, from hand-painted low poly weapons to modular levels in Unreal, as a result, I could expand my skills and decide on what I enjoy doing most.

I have always been identifying myself as a gamer, but now I can definitely say that I love making games more than playing them.

Real-time hair

For my graduation project I chose to research into real-time hair techniques used by developers nowadays, this subject seemed quite challenging yet fascinating enough to keep me motivated for the next six months. Having analyzed some of the most successful next-gen games I concluded that for 3D characters starring in AAA titles, artists use the method of alpha blending cards for hair creation. Polygonal cards with a diffuse texture of hair, generated or hand painted, and an alpha map for transparency are laid on top of each other to form the structure of a hairstyle.

There are a lot of ways to create the texture, fibers could be drawn by hand in Zbrush with a Curve brush or rendered from fibermesh, could be painted in photoshop or generated in Substance painter as seen in this cool example by Chang-Gon Shin.

For my project I wanted to try Xgen, I’ve encountered some incredibly realistic hair examples from other artists created with the plugin while researching and I wanted to get more familiar with Maya.

Working with XGen

First, I created a new description and placed a few guides on a slightly tilted simple plane and gave them a bit of a shape with the sculpting tool. After that, I adjusted the density, the length and the width of the fibers. Hair usually is thinner at the tips, to achieve that I altered the curve of the width ramp and tweaked the taper values until I got the result that I wanted.