Texturing Transparent Hair Strands?

[Lexii Lungu]

I am able to create mesh hair creations, but I noticed that I am missing something.. something small.

I make solid-looking hair, hair that has no "fly-aways" and no "strands" because I do not know how to texture them.. is there a tutorial out there that gives insight on how to create something like this (linked pictures as examples of what I am looking to learn to create)

[Chic Aeon]

Basically, as I understand the process, you make your textures with an ALPHA channel and then DRAW the strands on the transparent texture. Sometimes they would be textures that would be "whispy" for the length of the strand and sometimes only on the ends. Depends on their intended  use. 

There use to be transparent hair textures for sale full perm. I am not sure how well or even if they would work for what you want to do with your mesh.  

 

[Fluffy Sharkfin]

If you're looking for tutorials I'd recommend googling for terms like "low poly game hair tutorial" and "creating textures for hair cards" etc.  The number of results in the videos section alone seems to range between 500,000 and 1.5 million depending on the search terms used, at least the first few pages of which are usually youtube video tutorials.

It does seem that rather than using hair "cards" (flat 2D planes) a lot of creators in SL use tubes to give the illusion of volume from a wider range of angles, but the process of creating the textures will be pretty much identical regardless of which geometry you choose.

[Penny Patton]

Also, the blended, translucent hair textures in your examples are a bad way of texturing hair. You see it a lot in SL (in fact I've never seen mesh hair that doesn't incorporate this mistake and have to fix it myself on hair I purchase) but while it might look great for photoshoots under certain lighting conditions, most of the time it suffers from all of the common blended alpha texture glitches. It will have render sorting issues whenever you're in close proximity to other blended alpha textures, it's a bigger drain on framerates, and it does not play well with local light sources, often appearing much lighter or darker than the non-alpha portions of the hair. Rigged mesh hair that uses blended alpha also ends up with this strange looking "halo" effect which becomes very noticeable in front of other alpha textures, linden water, etcetera. It's similar to the effect of the no-defunct invisiprims people used to use to mask out portions of their avatar.

Instead look into using masked alpha to achieve a similar effect. You won't get the translucent strands of hair, everything will have a hard edge to it, but you can still get loose, whispy strands if you do it right.