Some Carrara Hairstyles For the Community
So I've been away for over a year now, and after finally making a reappearance I wanted to come back offering gifts. It is Christmas time after all, and I even think this is maybe the 1st day of Christmas for those doing the 12 days of Christmas thing? Or maybe it's tomorrow. Or yesterday. I get confused easily... :)
Anyway, for the past month or so, I've been messing around creating a buch of Carrara hairstyles. Each of these is built on a mesh that looks like this:
(Though it's turned invisible so only the hair is visible) and each is rigged to confoirm to Genesis 1 (the one true Genesis figure). But this can easily be re-rigged to conform to any generation of Genesis you prefer.
I didn't particularly build these hairstyles for doing hair sims, but there's no reason I can think of why they wouldn't work for that too.
Anyway, I've just uploaded the first 2 (I just counted and looks like I've got about 54 different hairstyles total, but that's including lots of beards, eyelashes, eyebrows too, closer to 40 actual hairstyles).
I have shaders for these hairstlyes too, but I just found out sharecg doesn't let me upload the shaders (doesn't seem to accept cbr format I guess) Anyone know how I can give out shaders? All the hairstlyes come default in 'basic brown'.
So I'll just add to this thread day by day as I upload more hairstlyes, and hopefully figure out how to give out the shaders for different hair colors too.
For the first day of Christmas, here's Boise Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99742/view/5/3D-Model/Boise-Hair
And here's 22 shaders for lots of different colors for the hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99744/view/7/Material-and-Shader/Boise-Hair-Shaders
It's a fairly simple long hair that just brushes past the shoulders, split in the middle. I was attempting to emulate a very familiar style I've seen commonly. I made this one maybe 2 weeks ago, so it's relatively recent but nothing very complex.
For the short and medium length hairstyles, nothing more is needed than to load the hairstyle into the scene (it comes as it's own figure) and then conform it to your Genesis 1 figure. For longer hairs that reach past the shoulders, then after posing your Genesis however you want, depending on how extreme the pose is (how much Genesis is bending/twisting his neck) then some expertise is needed with the Carrara hair modeling room and the brush tool, to brush the longer strands back behind or in front of shoulders, etc. I'm hoping to put together a short 5 min video tutorial on how to do that for anyone who doesn't already know. It's pretty simple stuff. For the promo pics though, I deliberately did not alter the hairstyle at all, and as you can see while there is some clipping through the shoulders, this particular hairstyle seems to work quite well 'out of the box' for most non-extreme poses.
Comments
Next up here's Champagne Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99743/gallery/5/3D-Model/Champagne-Hair
This one took me a couple of days and is a good bit more complex, learned a lot from doing this one. A nice classy updo, it's probably pretty obvious which older (but still solid) hairdo I was trying to emulate here. :)
I classify this one as a 'medium length' hairstyle, because although it implies quite long hair, because it's in an updo there's no difficulty using it in really any pose.
I'll keep adding more hairstlyes and beards to this thread hopefully day by day, and if I figure out some way to distribute the shaders for the haircolors, I'll update that here too.
Try zipping up the shaders and uploading the zip to ShareCG?
Otherwise you can attach a zip file to a forum message. If you'd like, I'd be happy to host them for you on Dartanbeck.com. Just another option for you. But then they'd be a Google Files download. You could set one of those up yourself too.
I use the free version of DropBox, which is always almost full.
I'm pretty sure a zip file will resolve the ShareCG issue though.
Jonstark! Hi!
And Thank you for these!!! Thank You!!!!
thanks Dart, I'll have to figure out how to zip up files... guessing a google search will show me the way :) I'd be very happy for you to host them on your site too, but I'm guessing I'd probably have to figure out how to zip files anyway to get them to you.
My pleasure! My way of saying mea culpa and I'm sorry for dropping off the planet for so long :)
And .zip worked fine, so now I've got the shaders up on sharecg for these hairs too, I'll edit the above posts to include the shader links. Zipping the files was the easiest thing ever, thanks for the tip! :)
Zippity zippity zip zip zip!
Great to see you again! Just got back myself. Still using Z series workstations?
Yup, still using a Z series, 32 render buckets. I'll probably stick with it for a while, til I can afford one of those new ultra threadrippers :)
Wow, pretty cool hair styles!
Always glad to see your posts. I hope you can stay a while.
I gave you a shout out a while back.
Thanks UB, I appreciate it :)
thanks for the hairdos
+1
Thank you so much. Very generous. Your hairs are amazing. Great to see you are alive and about.
Ok, 12 days of Christmas, day 2 :)
Thanks to the tips about how to upload, I realized it was foolish for me to upload the shaders separately from the hairstyle, so I've zipped them all up together into the same upload. Installation should be easy, just unzip the folder, then merge it with your 'Presets' folder for Carrara 8. Hopefully this will work right, so I'll go back and edit the first 2 hairstyles too, but let me know if there's any problems. Anyway, on to the next hairstyles.
First, here's Stylish Afro Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99747/view/5/3D-Model/Stylish-Afro-Hair
It's basically the simplest and easiest hairstyle I've done, only the Afro itself (which I'll also be releasing soon, but gotta space these out to fill up 12 days,right?) . I finished the Afro, then googled to see whether there are any variations on the Afro hairstyle, turns out there's tons, but this style caught my eye. Comes with only 2 shaders (black and brown) because it didn't seem like any other colors looked right to me.
Next, here's Rai Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99746/view/5/3D-Model/Rai-Hair
I was trying to emulate a style similar to Leandro hair for this one, and I failed badly, creating something more similar to Ryu hair.
I still liked what I came out with, so I didn't throw it in the trash, I just ended up very far from my original target. This happens a lot (like every hairstyle I try to make, practically). In fact, if you guys have any suggestions for future hairstyles, let me know and I might take a stab. Just be prepared that the end result might not look very close to what the original intent was... yet still it might work fine on its own :) This one comes with 6 shaders, just the basics.
Great looking coifs. Many thanks.
+1
awesome stuff that
Very nice hairstyles! Thanks So Much!
Magnificent!
The timing can't be better. I've just been reviewing some of you Hair tutorials. Much appreciated, and Merry Christmas!
My pleasure guys, thanks very much.
There were supposed to be 2 hairstyles today, but I realized one of them has a flaw (not a big one, but it isn't an easy fix), so pulling that one back to the drawing board for now, hopefully it won't take me too long to fix it...
So for now, here's Little Pony Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99750/view/5/3D-Model/Little-Pony-Hairstyle
This one was freakin' hard. One thing I learned is that ponytails are really really tough. Also, when I built this I wasn't using a photo reference, just going from my mental picture of what a ponytail looked like. Surprise! I finished it at long last (at least 2 days of attempts, scrapping it, walking away from it, then thinking of another approach and trying again, over and over again..)
Then when I was satisfied, I thought... hey, maybe I should go check it against photo references of normal ponytails, because that's all I was going for... Surprise! It looked nothing at all like a normal run-of-the mill ponytail. So lesson learned there.
That said, I still like it and think it's useable, and I have seen similar styles worn by women in real life, so I didn't throw it out. It reminded me more of something you might see on a 'my little pony' than what you'd see a normal gal who tied back her hair for convenience, so I went with the name 'Little Pony'. I did go on to make a normal looking ponytail later (will release down the road a bit) but this one has a special place in my heart because of how tough it was, and how much I learned from making it. :)
It comes with 7 shaders for a variety of colors.
I love it! I've made a couple of successful ponytails but, you're right. Tough!
I agree, I do see this style and I like it. I like all of the styles you have up! Fantastic!
I haven't been able to try them yet. Quick question:
The first post has the Shaders, so the shaders aren't controlling the style at all, just the hair settings?
I went back and fixed the files on each, so they're all zipped with shaders. There are some style controls mixed in some of the shaders though (depending on the hairstyle), things like clump, wave and kink, though it's not a huge effect, but that's what each one has it's own set of shaders, instead one set of shaders for universal use. Honestly that's what's slowing me down is making renders for each color shader, I didn't factor that in to my planning :)
Nice renders!
Next up, here's Achilles Hair:
https://sharecg.com/v/99754/view/5/3D-Model/Achilles-Hair
This is an older hair I made a while ago on an older platform, and I was on the fence about whether to include it because I was never happy with it back in the day. But after plugging away in the Carrara hair modeling room to churn out a bunch of hairs, I learned a lot of new tricks, and armed with that newfound honing of knowledge I dove back into this one to see if I could update it in such a way that it was more acceptable. I'm mostly happy with it now, and I can see it being very useful as a swept back messy long hairstyle that would work well in most fantasy settings. Or perhaps pairing this with a beard, it might work well in a modern scene of a spec ops team member.
Wow! That looks Awesome! But I've already started using the Little Pony hairstyle on this dude... and I love it! I'm gonna try this one (Achilles) on him as well!
clicking the image takes you to the Challenge WIP where this image came from
I really love that you grow these onto a bust that conforms to Genesis! Thanks for that!
Ha, nice one! I hadn't really thought of what that style would look like on a male, but seems to work :)
I thought it was the best way to ensure they were usable on as many characters as possible, instead of locked to just one. The beards, mustaches, eyebrows and eyelashes that I built however there was no way to put them on an external figure, so they load right to Genesis1 mesh itself and aren't useable by any other figure, which is a bit limiting and unfortunate. However the hairs are so small and so noticeable if they aren't aligned right to the mesh that there's no way around it and putting it on an external conforming figure just wouldn't work.
Actually some of the thicker beards might work on an external figure, so I may be making too broad of a generalization. But I was a bit brain dead at the time, and was doing them as an experiment anyway, so I just didn't think about it. And now I'm sort of making excuses, lol :)
I'm totally fine with them growing directly onto Genesis. For me, that's the Carrara figure. Everything before it works on it, the surface structure is very Carrara friendly (especially with PhilW's Eye Surface for Genesis) and GenX2 can bring morphs from Generation 3 through Genesis 3 into it. I've then used Riversoft Art's Character Convertors to run Genesis 8 shapes down to Genesis 3, and then GenX2 those tto Genesis... just freaking Awesome!!!
Here's what I was doing with Carrara's Dynamic Hair
With you're permission I'll add a link to your ShareCG gallery below the link to your hair course.
Since I wrote that page I've gleaned more info and ideas regarding Forces from 3DXtract and other sources. These things can really help us get Carrara's dynamic hair to perform in many ways.
Those video you made gave me the perfect starting point for that hair. They also helped me to be more fearless with the settings. Knowing a bit better what they do really helps. So to help get Rosie 5's hair to keep from going everywhere, I used many point forces (some pulling in like a black hole, others pushing out for volume) along with various collision meshes that I could animate according to the scene. That stuff made this So Much More than what I am doing now with dForce. I will be revisiting this stuff again, for sure! Probably try going back to the basics without all that fancy stuff and, if/when I feel that I need some Anim-Help, I may just try some of Carrara's many other tools(?)!