Hair In Lightwave

Creating Polygon Hair - Tutorials - LightWave 3D®

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Creating Polygon Hair
by Elmar Moelzer

Tutorials Interactive G Animation Rendering Special Effec Surfacing & T UV Mapping Modeling Spanish Tuto Video Tutoria DFX+ / Digit Tutorial Subm

Since the excellent hair- tutorial by Stu Aitken for Inside LightWave® 6 (and 7), one question has been asked over and over again: Howto put hair on that head? Given a bald female head may look sexy sometimes (a la Alien3), but it does not really fit my taste and probably not the taste of most readers of this tutorial. There are quite a few ways to do hair and probably the most popular solution is the use of Sasquatch(-light), the wonderful hair- plugin by Steve Worley. This solution certainly produces great and realistic hair,but it also has its disadvantages, which are due to the nature of these kinds of plugins. Because of it being a post- rendering- effect, it does not do raytraced shadows and reflections and it does not show correctly in refractions neither. This is why I decided to develop my own method for doing polygon- hair, based upon what I had learned from old techniques, but by using the new features ofLightWave® 6.5+. This hair does not have the disadvantages of plugin- hair and it could also be used as a proxy together with Sasquatch(light) to have something that will show in mirrors and to cast raytraced shadows on the body. This tutorial requires solid knowledge of LightWave®s tools and is probably not to well suited for beginners. It requires LightWave® 6.5+ and an image- manipulation- softwaresuch as Aura, PhotoShop or PSpro. Part1: Modeler I decided to use subpatches for my hair- strands, due to the fact that they require less geometry for the definition of the shapes an thus are easier to handle. The use of normal polygons might be more efficient, which would help decrease rendertimes, but would certainly increase the amount of work needed. Modeler with the head of my still hairless"Cornelia" in a background- layer (active layer 2):

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/

23/07/2004

Creating Polygon Hair - Tutorials - LightWave 3D®

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Create a flat box with 7 segments in y- direction:

Create a UV- map with the following settings:

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/

23/07/2004Creating Polygon Hair - Tutorials - LightWave 3D®

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The result is a UV- map that is nicely laid out on the UV-grid:

Now go into subpatch- mode [TAB] and use the drag- tool to modify the geometry to look similar to this:

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/

23/07/2004

Creating Polygon Hair - Tutorials - LightWave 3D®

Pagina 4 di 15This is our very first strand. The area of the hair- root may stick into the head a bit, but the strand must not cut through the head anywhere else. You should try to have a bit more space to the head especially on the sides. Please copy this strand into a separate layer for later use. Now clone this strand and place the copies around half the head by moving and rotating them. Take care for thestrands not to cut into the head anywhere. If you like you can modify the strands to fit the shape of the head a bit better. You do not need to pay attention to the shoulders- area yet, as we will do that later on. This may sound like a tedious task, but it isn't. In fact, it should not take experienced users more than 5 minutes to do this. I decided to put two strands behind the ear:http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/hair/

23/07/2004

Creating Polygon Hair - Tutorials - LightWave 3D®

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Now copy these strands into a new layer and move them down and in a bit. This will become the layer of hair closest to the head. In the best of cases this hair- layer neither cuts through the hair- layer above, nor through the head (this should be avoided...