Research Project

 For my research project, I decided on learning more on about how to create stylized hair in Zbrush as well as focus on creating cleaner shapes inside of Zbrush. This was originally suppose to tie into my project 3 with my character who has a big piece of hair as part of the design as well. As for cleaner shapes, that is a general good thing to do no matter the type of piece of art being done inside of Zbrush.

Above are the videos that have aided me in my research goals. The second video on hair was recommended by Yami Trujillo after out first portfolio check in.

When it came to my hair research, I found Dylan Ekren's hair brush very nice and useful to create a majority of the major hair strands. Here is the link to the free GumRoad download: link. The way the brush works is it's pretty much an Insert Mesh Brush that you can use over a non subdived mesh to create chunks of hair strands. What's nice are the different strands of hair brushes that are included:

The various hair brushes that are included

The variety in available brushes helps with creating various in the hair strands and because of the zmodeler nature of the hair strands, edge loops can be easily deleted and moved around to create further variation. To create stylized braided hair, this brush set allows for similar functionality to Dylan Ekren's hair brush, but of course for braided hair.

The process to creating stylized hair based on the first video goes like this:

1. Block out the shape of the hair with big pieces/section off the different major pieces

2. Change curve stroke settings for the hair brushes to work correctly. Feel free to tweak as necessary:

3. To create the hair strokes, work from back to front when creating the strands.

4. After creating a strand, use the move brush to tweak and adjust as necessary. Be sure to not subdive in order to allow for better manipulation until finalized. 

For the other method of hair sculpting, it involves creating the basic shapes and then using the transpose tool to bend and shape the hair pieces for the major chunks. To add detail, the subtools can be subdived and further sculpted on with orb crack brushes to create further details. Combining the two methods could create some interesting hair pieces.

When it comes to creating cleaner shapes, the video was randomly recommended to me on Youtube and tied in to what Nick had showed us in class. As there are different approaches to creating such a task, a majority of them I found all follow a certain thought process. To create clean shapes, here are general guidelines to follow:

1. The mask tool is important as well as slice curve brushes to create various polygroups as well as help separate the various edges that need to be clean

2. Use Zremesher to create clean clean geo to work with before polishing up edges. Make sure to use the clip curve brush to also remove jagged edges as Zremesher does not like that.

3. To polish up edges once polygroups have been formed, use polish by features (donut hole unchecked) or smooth groups brush to smooth out the areas/sharpen up the edges