Development - XGen Hair

 Moving onto hair, I decided to learn and make use of the XGen tab within Maya. Not only is this a very useful tool, it is also something used in games and movies to create detailed hair and grass planes. I used this tool to create and turn the hair into cards ready for adding hair textures onto.

I first created the hair I wanted using the XGen tools and guides until I was happy with the result. Turing these strands of hair into usable cards was easy enough by just increasing their width until they were square. I then turned them into geometry. at first, all the cards was facing the same direction which didnt look good at all as from the side it was easily noticable. I then did some manual ajustments to give the cards a more natural look to them.

To get a better understanding of how the hair would look when textured. I added a hair alpha texture to the cards allowing me to visually understand what needed changing and moving.

I deleted the XGen cards created for the eye brows as they were messy and decided to hand place them myself as these would just be used to create some volume to the brows.