This is my first post here on the Blender Artists forum. I hope to make many more of these in the future as both a learner and a contributor.
I’m rather new to 3D modeling, but I’ve poked around in Blender and read/watched enough tutorials to be relatively familiar with how the software works. The modeling aspect is still a bit unfamiliar, but I’m slowly getting there and it is my hope that this forum will help me improve!
Now, enough with the rambling introduction. My main focus in working with Blender is meshing with polygons–creating hairs, more specifically, out of triangular faces. For the past week or so I’ve worked by importing preexisting meshes made by qualified creators and observing their structures in order to improve my own. I’ve learned about normals, backface culling, assigning groups, etc., and I’m fairly confident in my ability to navigate through Blender as a whole.
This is one of the curliest hair meshes I could find for observational purposes. I did not create this mesh myself.
Eager to see how these spiral curls could be created, I split the mesh into separate groups and pulled out the most uniform pieces. You can see these pieces in my post below:
Now, I’ve searched the four corners of the internet to find whatever useful information could be given on this subject. Unfortunately, my searches have been unsuccessful for the most part. I’m a very visual learner, as I’m sure you can conclude, and have had no luck finding any video tutorials, let alone a written one. I have very basic knowledge of how grease pencil paths and bezier curves work, but not nearly enough knowledge to successfully recreate these curls on my own.
The question(s): In observing the above screenshots, what methods would you recommend one use in order to achieve this curled effect?* If you were in my shoes, how would you go about creating these shapes?
(*Please note, I intend to work with triangular faces as they are the only type that my game can properly display.)
Post a step-by-step guide or a pictorial and you’ll be my dearest friend!
Model Bezier curve, set Extrude and add Taper curve object; tweak Taper by moving it’s points, Ctrl-T tilt hair curve points.
When it’s done, Alt-C convert to mesh and Ctrl-F Triangulate or Poke faces.
I’ve noticed, however, that my curves appear to be more ribbon-like than the ones I’ve posted above. Is there any way that I can make them more rounded and “full,” if that makes sense? They seem rather flat.
Don’t extrude, just set the depth value to desired one and change the resolution value to 1 or higher one, you’ll also have to set the fill option to “front”. To make the ends of the hair thinner just go into edit mode of the curve, select the ending point, press ALT+S and move with your mouse. Another things that I also recommend that you do is to “play” with the resolution of your curve which is probably set to 12 by default, reduce it for compensation of the polygons.
