Hair Falling Through Body and Zigzag Parting - Bad Hair Day

  1. The hair parting has a zigzag pattern. This is in spite of parting the hair strands with the comb editor so they are on the same side of the head their roots are. I believe this due to the hair particle’s children. How I can make it straighter?

  2. After combing I found hair coming out through the forehead over the eyes (see the attached hair_comes_out_over_eye.png). How did this happen and how is it avoided?

  3. After running a simulation I find some of the hair falling through or into the body (see the attached before_simulation.png and after_simulation.png where it falls into the shoulder). How can hair be kept outside the body in a simulation?

  4. As soon as I put the 3D View Editor in Particle Edit mode the Emission settings in “Properties Editor => Particle” grays out and it is no longer possible to make changes there. Is there a way to undo all the edits done in the Particle Edit mode and get back to a point where Emission settings can be edited again without deleting the entire particle system?

The .blend file can be downloaded from:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/30211
Remove the .blend extension and unzip. (The uncompressed file was too large for pasteall.org)

Attachments




a) In hair system, cache , click ‘free bake’.

a2) Go into your modifiers and change your viewport subsurf to 1, and keep render at 1.

b) Back in the hair system, at the top click, ‘free edit’ the hair is back to shooting out at the normals.

c) Increase your segments from 5 to maybe 7 -10. This will help with collisions.

d) in display, steps icrease it from 2 to 4,5,or 6 this will make the hair smooth, and not zig zag

  1. Now go into particle edit mode, and increase the deflect emitter fro .25 to about .5 or .6. When you comb the hair now the hairs will be pushed farther off the scalp preventing hair in the eye.

  2. In cache, change the step size to 1.

  3. answered above (free bake, and free edit to go back to square 1)

And give the hair a bit of randomness and style. In children, change randomness to .01, and click the ‘wave’ hairstyle and change the amplitude to .01

Short answer for hair collisions? You’re out of luck. Hair (including object and strand-to-strand collision) is on the short list of things to fix for Psy-Fi, because it’s pretty abysmal as it exists right now.

Thanks. Your suggestions improved things a lot :). The combing can no longer put in inside the body just as it should not, the hair no longer falls into the body during simulation and rests upon its surface instead as it should, it has more body, and the waves make it more realistic.

However the parting is still not as straight as I would like it to be. These screen shots show what it looks like in Object Mode and Particle Edit Mode respectively. The Display Steps were set to 7.


I think part of the problem (pun intended!) is that you have too few parents and too many children. You have the default 1000 parents and 100 children. If you have a decent amount of memory try something like 3000 parents 33 children, and see if that helps.

I usually work in ortho mode, as perspective gives me a headache. Top view, pan way out so the head is small, and the comb brush is large, and comb the hair straight back forehead to back of neck direction. then with a few smaller brush strokes pull just the right side more to the right, and then the left side more to the left leaving a perfect part. pull em some more and then comb the hairs down and into a good style.

The hair shader needs some work, let me know if you need some node ideas on that.

I went to “Properties editor => Particle => Emission” and in the Number field (which I believe to be the same as parents) changed from 1000 to 3000. I went to the Children tab and changed both the Display and Render fields to 33. The result was asymmetric, which looked okay on her left side but had very thin, or bald, spots on her right:


I do not know what caused this. But removing and reapplying the same Density Vertex Group solved it.

After following your suggestions about parting I was able to make it much straighter, but I still have a problem with straightness around the scalp’s vertex area. Also the way the children follow their parents tend to cause the hairs to bundle together in an unnatural pattern near the parting:


The farther away from the part the less the bundles of hair are evident and the more natural it looks.

I have changed the hair color since the upload to Pasteall.org. I changed it to the color code for “Honey Blonde” that I found here:
http://collectedwebs.com/art/colors/hair/
It is to my eye a much better match for her skin tone. Any other ideas on the hair shader nodes are welcome. :slight_smile: