1. Create a sphere at the origin by Ctrl+LMB clicking the Sphere on the Create shelf tab.

2. Dive into the sphere object and set Rows and Columns to 50 to get a rounder sphere.

3. Add hair to the sphere using the Add Fur tool on the Hair shelf tab.

4. On the Fur object, set Length to 0.6.

You will see the default hair look now. The guide hairs are sticking out straight, and each generated hair is a blend between multiple guides in it’s neighborhood.

To get a better look at the hair, set up a quick render.

1. Rotate the viewport so you are looking straight down onto the sphere.

2. Ctrl+LMB click the Area Light tool on the Lights and Cameras shelf tab. This will create the light in your viewing position.

3. Rotate the viewport back to look straight at the sphere.

4. Switch to the Render View and click Render.

You should get something like this:

For dreadlocks, you want to have each hair follow the guide that’s closest to it, so you get a thick strand of many hairs around each guide.

To achieve this, you can use a clusterid attribute. Hair is not interpolated between guides with different clusterids, so if you assign each hair it’s own clusterid, you should get the desired effect.

1. Dive into the fur object > guides node.

2. Attach a Primitive Wrangle to the INPUT_GUIDES node, making sure it’s display flag is set.

3. Set the VEXpression parameter to i@clusterid = @primnum;. This will put each primitive’s index (@primnum) into it’s clusterid attribute (i@clusterid), so each primitive will have a different value.

4. Go to the Guides tab on the fur object and reduce the Density to around 50, to get fewer and thicker strands.

Here’s what you should get after these adjustments:

Get the hairs of each strand to pull closer to their guide.

1. Go to the Appearance ▸ Clump tab on the fur object.

2. Turn on Clump Fur.

3. Set Density to 50, to match the guides.

4. Set Clump Geo Source to Use Guide Curves. This will reuse the guide curves for clumping.

5. Set the curve to something like the screenshot below. This will make the hairs quickly move towards the guide and then continue straight.

   

6. You can now control the overall effect using Tightness. The default of 0.5 moves the hair points halfway towards the guide. If you set 1.0 here, the hair will move all the way to the guide, resulting in a very thin strand.

7. On the Basic tab, increase Segments to 20.

   Note

   This is necessary because, with the default of 4, the hair curves don’t have enough segments to represent the steep ramp you used above, The extra segments will also be helpful to set up frizz with a high frequency.

Use frizz to get rid of the perfectly straight look.

1. Go to Appearance ▸ Frizz on the fur object and set Maximum Frizz to 0.25.

2. Set Frequency to 20.

   Note

   Remember that you increased the number of hair segments in the previous section. Without this, you wouldn’t have enough points in the hair curves to represent the high frequency noise.

3. Set the ramp to something like this, to get frizz all along the hair:

   

   Note

   Alternatively you can ignore the ramp and set both Minimum Frizz and Maximum Frizz to 0.25.

1. Navigate to the hair shader inside the fur object (Located in fur/shopnet1/textured_hair).

   Note

   As a shortcut, you can LMB the arrow next to the Material parameter on the Fur object’s Basic tab.

   Use Ctrl+LMB to open the shader parameters in a new window.

2. Reduce the hair’s reflectiveness by reducing Intensity on the Reflection tab to 0.02.

3. Turn on Randomize for Diffuse Saturation and Diffuse Intensity on the Randomness Tab.

4. You can use the ramps to create a few bright gray hairs. Set up the ramps according to the screenshot below.

To style the hair, use the Groom shelf tool.