Grooming is a challenging task. There are billions of haircuts, and trusting only your references sometimes is not enough. The more you know about hair and hairstyles, the better your results will be.
Knowing how hairdressers work is crucial if you want your grooming to be realistic, especially if you will simulate the hair. This tutorial aims to mimic real-world procedures using 3D grooming tools. It's a quick guide where you can find many production tips to speed up your work and keep things well organized.
Using this method, you will easily groom any hairstyle.
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COMMENTS
Anthony_Buckley 7 months ago |
I have saved your page to my bookmarks to completely go through this tutorial again (after a fixated read last night).
Your work is appreciated, celebrated and persuasive. Your writing style is direct, encouraging and thorough. I am humbled to have this MasterClass shared for free.
October 1, 2023->Feb 1, Feb 2024...hope to return to this comment section again one day.
deniszen 7 months ago |
Hi Anthony,
Thank you very much for your appreciation! I'm pleased you find it helpful.
Sharing knowledge is extremely important.
Best!
Denis
Anthony_Buckley 3 months ago |
And I'm back! After studying everything Houdini (and ZBrush) for 100 days to learn Solaris, procedural geometry, grooming, and a bit of fluid VFX I felt ready to try grooming a head I had sculpted.
Using DenisZen's technique of grouping polys (in ZBrush) before importing, I was able to attack zones one at a time. What a great way to start as compared to painting attributes for zones. My scalp was one zone, but my eyebrows and lashes were different–a beginners effort. I realized that eyelids just don't have enough smooth topology to paint eyelashes, so I took a new approach starting this week. I draw a curve on the polygroup for the eyelid, use a VOP node to get the relative bounding box and add a Channel Ramp to control an EyelashLength attribute that is BindExported from the VOP.
Taking DenisZen's advice from RocketGrooming, I made an eyelashes node that places hairs along a grid that has been MatchSized and PathDeformed to match the Drawn Curve (which is Resampled and Smoothed). My EyelashLength attribute can now control the profile of the lashes to look lofty on the outer edge, shorter all around, or even patchy. Thank you DenisZen for the reminder to always share knowledge in your tutorials!
Moving into Solaris, I discovered the KarmaHairProcedural...a 19.5 node that replaces the experience of using the shelf "add fur" set up, but in Solaris. After many red exclamation marks, I got it to work, showing hair while rendering in real time. There is only one HairProcedural tutorial on YouTube called "Wheat Fields using Karma" by Jason Slabber. Crucial info is included here to using MaterialX yielding different hair strand colours. Houdini has the best information in their documentation, allowing you to open a demo file to see a furry Torus.
I checked out the Patreon of JesusFC to get that crucial knowledge of grooming tutorials, but to date I feel like DenisZen is the ONLY one using hair for scalps and not bears and lions and dogs. But now, so am I. Thanks for being the inspiration to get a hobbyist grinding from "meager ogre" to "mediocre"!! I LOVE hair grooming now...but I still steer clear from GuideGroom nodes :D
deniszen 7 months ago |
Thanks! I'll check it.
merlintornaus 6 months, 3 weeks ago |
Dude this is spam, I advise you to delete it
fianna 6 months, 3 weeks ago |
Wow - that is a really extensive document you prepared. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Not sure what is the spam, but please don't delete what you posted. Will revisit once some down-time comes. But I just saw this now on the homepage and had to click and see ^_^ Have a good day!
__feisar__ 6 months ago |
Awesome, awesome tutorial! Very informative and easy to understand! Thanks so much for sharing!
lars korb 5 months, 2 weeks ago |
Thank you for this awesome tutorial. Very good insights and I'll be going through it a few more times.
There are two nodes that are included with your 'allHere' setup that are unfortunately missing:
'DViz' and 'smartViz'
These show up in the network, they have adjustable parameters, but they unfortunately have no contents (and no effect in the graph).
You made pretty good description for the 'DViz' node, and I'm going to try and recreate it.
If possible, it would be awesome if you could include those two nodes in the 'allHere' graph
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge!
Gratefully,
Lars
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