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mesh hair tutorial


Tenly
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Ive seen other users post asking about mesh hair tutorials and the links are always to strand hair. I dont think people creating hair for second life are creating hair in blender using strands. It looks more to me like modeling a shape..because wouldnt that keep your poly counts low...or are you converting these strands to a shape?

yes I'm noob. saw some great tuts on strand hair but non of it applied to SL and certainly didnt show how to prepare or export for SL.

Can you use the grease pen to draw a basic style and fill in?

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I finally stumbled on the correct term for the kind of mesh hair tutorial I was looking for. This is known as polygon hair.

Now with some great tutorials watched Im ready to start practicing, however, I noted a reference to rigging hair, yet none of the tuts Ive watched show how to rig hair. and only one showed a most important step, UV mapping.

One showed it was important to make the UV map with the very first strand and indicated that UV map would be used for all strands because all strands would start from the initial strand. He also said the UV map would have to be updated as he went along but never showed that. Since hair has many more parts than say a shirt or pants I'm concerned that watching videos for clothing isnt going to cover any possible glitches that one might encounter with regard to hair. OR, Im over thinking it.

with regard to rigging. Ive watched some related to clothes. But Ive also read that with some hair, especially long hair, you have to rig it to more than the avatar scalp. Im not finding a tutorial on that.

If anyone wants a list of the tutorials I found let me know. If anyone has some urls that might help me with UV maps and rigging related to hair, please share. Im certain Im not the only one who would like to know more specifically related to polygon hair mesh.

Im using blender.

thanks for your time

tenly

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Hello tenly,

unfortunately there are not much hair rigging tutorials for SL. I figured that when trying to find some for other users having similar questions.

Regarding the weighting towards more then just the scalp: yes. Think about it like this: when you divide a body into it's armature and bones, and have a look at the SL skeleton you will see, there is also a neckbone a chest, shoulders etc.
So if hair is longer then just i,e. a military cut, you have of course to weight it also to all bones it will physically be influenced by (hang over so to say).

A Haircut where the hair hangs down to the end of the neck would also be needed to be weighted to / and influenced by the neck bone. If it is longer then of course also by the chest and the collarbones. Or even the upper arm bones if strings of the hair would reach over these.

Thus watching regular weighting tutorials is not wrong, because they will give you an understanding of how to actually weight 'whatever' item onto the skeleton.

The example with the UV map is mostly for flat layered Polygon hair (used in engines with workarounds for the alphasorting issue, or with internal layering and sorting handlers) where those flat hair-platforms can basically generate all from the same line of vertices. But generally don't worry too much about this, you can create your UV layout for your hair as you wish, and as it fits best with the topology and geometry of the hairmesh. Just try to make as little seams as needed, because every seam doubles the vertices insides of the game engine.

In addition: Unfortunately not every tutorial on how to create polygon hair is helpful for SL. since every engine has it's own needs and requirements and quirks when it comes to these things. So one hair technic that would work great for let's say 'the sims' hair-props would totally not work well for SL mesh hair.

And in SL you generally might consider making hair out of bigger shapes and tapered cylenders, rather then what other game engines use (like the above described flat polygon layering).

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  • 1 year later...

I would really appreciate any information on making hair for second life no one seems to want to give any information about it or what the REQUIREMENTS are and its rather fustrating because with out requiremnets how do you know  how to make hair for this game engine, can anyone pls help?

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