Blender Tutorial – photorealistic hair

When my children and I saw the movie “Trolls” in the cinema, the first thing I noticed and that intrigued me was how well and detailed the hair looked on all these characters. After the movie I set myself a goal to model a similar character with photorealistic looking hair using Blender.

In this tutorial I will show you the Node settings I used in Blender to render the photorealistic hair of my own Troll.

Once you created the character and applied the Hair particle modifier (I will create a separate tutorial on this later) the work on the Node editor can begin.

I applied the following Shader:

Diffuse BSDF shader determines the general color of a material when light shines on it.

shader of a material when light shines on it. Hair BSDF is a shader that determines also the general color but is optimised for hair.

is a shader that determines also the general color but is optimised for hair. Translucent BSDF does emulates how light is transmitted.

does emulates how light is transmitted. Mix Shaders is needed to connect the various nodes to each other.

You can play around with the Roughness values but I found that for this model these worked best.

If you have suggestions for future tutorials you like to see than please let me know in the comments below.