Ok so while planning out uv which is turning out to be today's slogan. I wanted to try something with the hair and see what i could do with it.
Now for the hair i knew i didn't want to use hair simulation, or use software like z-brush or mudbox to create hair. I also didn't want to have a flat texture on her hair. So it either had no pattern or some weird drawing of hair which would look 1 dimensional.
The solution oh yes. Back in the summer of 2011 during the holidays i've been working on my own little project and was doing some hair experiments, in Carrara. So i used shading patterns such as checkers and caution signs to create some stylised hair and to great effect. Now while checkers as a pattern doesn't sound very hair like when you just the attribute so you only have boxes on the vertical and not horizontal. You end up with lines going down, (instead of squares.) So it looks like stylised hair that is effective.
So i thought i would apply this style to Savanna Montanna in Maya.
My first few experiments were to place the "Pattern" checkers in the bump map section. It took me a while to get use again to Maya hypershader again. But i eventually got something that looked like what i was doing in Carrara. But i wanted to see what other patterns i could maybe use and see if i could get anything that was more suited to BIG 80 hair. I succeeded with a bulge pattern.
Now while a bump map is well and good the result weren't as good as something like a displacement map or Normal map. Now knowing i didn't want to go down the normal map route and open all those complications. I went down a displacement map. The issue here was the making the connections in the hypershader. In the end to cut this post short the displacement shader is connected the ambient colour in the blinn. This way my blinn colour channel is free for me too choose a colour. It works so it's all right.
Oh i should also mention that haven't done any actual cutting out of uv yet. So this tests on the hair was me just saying plannar mapping on the z axis so there not an exact fit but it does the job in seeing is the idea translates.
Wow that was a technical post with technical stuff in. Anyway tutorial tomorrow and then gets this UVs cut.
