tips to make this hair messy and sweaty looking?

Toobis

(look at pic) I have a characters hair for G8F (Xena I know) and wanted to have it looking more sweaty and messy looking like she's been in a battl. Any tips for such a thing? It would be for iray. thx.

Silas3D

Unfortunately in the screenshot you've posted the hair is very dark so it's impossible to see it's default texture. A viewport render would have shown more detail. Generally speaking, as with skin, to make the hair appear wet or sweaty you'd need to raise the glossiness or specular and lower any roughness. Messiness or a matted appearance will be difficult to achieve unless 1. there are morphs built into the hair to support the desired look, or 2. You're comfortable using modelling software such as Blender to add your own morphs (assuming this is a card/ribbon based hair and not fiber/strand-based). Hope this helps!

felis

You could try to add a geoshell to the hair and apply a water shader to that, and probably use the same oppacity map in the geoshell as in the hair (everything assuming it is hairstrips and not SBH).

Linwelly

one way is to add the dual lobe specular weight in the surface shader, which adds a lot of gloss aka sweat.  For the messy, if the usual morph oftions (I don't know which ones that hair has) don't do the magic, you can use a d-former on the hair to mess it up

kpr

Sweaty/wet hair doesn't usually shine, unless the light cast on it is very extreme (hair absorbs moisture, so it would probably need to be very wet, with water droplets still present on it too). However, if you make the skin look wet (which is a little easier, though still quite tricky to do well) then your viewers will see "sweaty hair" if you can make it look lank (thinner, and probably straighter) - as mentioned already, if the hair comes with morphs (styles) to do either of those things then start with those. And you can add to the effect by pulling some strands around (especially it it isn't "strand-based"), especially where the hair touches/has-touched the skin (hair doesn't sweat, so concentrate on the areas around the face/neck/scalp) as mentioned a d-former would probably work for that and Meshgrabber, if you have it, certainly will.