Rudimentary Brushing and BPR Render Result Combined with Coverage this is another important part. Also, note MaxFibers is set all the way down to one. I used the GroomHairLong brush for a simple brushing. Then upped the COVERAGE to max (which actually widens the strips) after you’ve taken out twist and rotation. What I’ve done is widen the root and tip to one. Match the menu settings you see in the last image to go from the default thin fiber-looking mesh to a more traditional hair card type of mesh. When rendered they go from flat cards to hair fibers via opacity.Īlpha masks are a very important part of this technique. One of the most important parts of this technique is the opacity map that defines the final look of the hair cards. Setting the gravity slider all the way over to 1 and changing the gravity profile to where it fills the window area. This is a simple manner of setting things like revolve and twist to zero. Going into the modifier panel and changing some settings we can reduce the amount of fiber needed by reshaping the fiber with the controls provided. You will immediately notice the unruly appearance of the default fibers.ĭefault Fibermesh From Masking the Bottom Two Sections of Scalp This is a simplified version as you will develop your own grouping to suit your workflow. This division is not arbitrary but based on working with parts of the scalp instead of the entire scalp area to match length and other aspects more easily. In the picture below you will see CC3 mesh with the scalp area divided up into subsections via poly groups. CC3 allows me to use the time-saving GoZ function and is my choice for custom character bases. In this case, I’ll be using the default female from Character Creator 3, but any character mesh will work.
I will only be doing a couple of segments on the model’s head so we can see what is going on with the underlying mesh. We are not going to get into grooming (good luck with that… just don’t give up) as that could take up volumes but we will take a quick look at getting started. So, let’s take a quick, no-frills, dive into changing those default fibers to usable hair cards with proper UV mapping. Rightly so, but many don’t realize how close they are to creating transparent hair cards that can render out nicely… even in real-time. There are so many things to do in a 3D model that we move on to other things to keep the creative juices going. That frustration is not unusual with higher-end applications. Most eventually hit a roadblock and gave up. Seems several just stopped here while others tinkered a bit (groping around the dark is more like it) before hitting the Accept button to get results. Not knowing the modifier panel made it worse for others as ZBrush can be more than a little cryptic with descriptions of the UI. Looking like fibers instead of cards compounded the confusion for some. That part is indeed easy enough but the problem to hair newbies was the amount of fiber generated by default, the way it looked (thin, long, and somewhat unruly), combined with hair going everywhere created massive information overload. Then you could go into a modifier menu to control how you want the hair to look. Just draw a mask over the area you want to have hair and press the preview button. To some ZBrush wasn’t new but Fibermesh was and to others, both were new and mysterious. My last mention of Fibermesh brought more questions (it usually does) with an overabundance of questions from people just getting started with it.
#ZBRUSH 4 HAIR TUTORIAL PC#
Like everything else I write about it’s not magic, it just takes a grasp of the basics to get started on your journey to custom hair without crashing your pc over a heavy polycount. ZBrush Fibermesh is a powerful option for easy, low poly, hair card creation.