Hair as tattoo.

I have been planning to make a few hairstyles(textures, not prim hair) for awhile now.
But i found it very hard to find any information on the subject.

What i want to do is make a hair(texture) i can use by putting it on as a tattoo in the Appearance menu. That would have to be with alpha channels for the transparancy , wich makes it more complicated.

All i find on the forums is info on prim-hair (and their textures) and also about skinning, using the templates.
But hardly anything on photosourcing hair. ( i know i need the templates for that too)

So if anyone is willing to share their experiences on this i will be very gratefull.

What i am mostly looking for are good sites to photosource hair.
Also information on using brushes and so to paint the hair is appreciated.

For painting hair (and lots of other organics), I'd recommend David Nagel's Brushes. Series 12, 19, and 21 are all for hair and fur.

As for using hair as tattoos, body hair is a no-brainer, but for head hair, you realize you'll be painting directly onto the head, so you won't be able to do anything besides buzz cuts, and maybe corn rows, right? For anything longer than that, you'll need to use either the hair template for regular avatar hair, or textures on prims for prim hair.

Photosourcing hair for an overlay is possible, but I don't recommend it. It's time consuming work cleaning up around hair folicles. If you go this route I recommend at least a 4/1 (that's 2048/512 pixels) resolution increase over the final texture size for that type of work. That translates to 16 editable pixels for every one on the final image.

You're much better off rendering hair by hand with good brush effects, and Chosen has given an excellent link for brushes to use in accomplishing that task. You get cleaner details and you are not bound by a predefined texture.

I apreciate the link, but About.com seems to be undergoing some changes, which to me made those exact links that you posted, non-working. I was able to download 13 of his brush sets all in all, the rest of the links showed me a page with the ads on top, then blank white where the information for the hair brushes with download links should have been. So, none of the brushes that you refer to here, can be downloaded from there at this point. At least it is like that to me. I bookmarked the page anyway, and found other nice brushes there, so thanks!

Google for "Nagel brushes", and you'll find lots of other places to grab them while About.com gets their act together.

Thank you Chosen and others.



Yes the idea is to make "stubbled" hair.

I have heard of those brushes before, so im sure to check them out. (lets hope they work on PS 7.0)

It might even be time to butcher my piggybank and finally get me that Wacom tablet

I would figure its the same process as when you paint it the hair directly on a skin.
Of wich i have seen many superb examples.

Keep the tips coming

The brushes will work with 7.0 (I think that was the version that introduced customizable brushes in the first place), but I'd highly recommend you upgrade to 7.0.1 via the free patch from adobe.com. 7.0 had a lot of bugs, including a pretty nasty one that destroys your ability to create alpha channels properly in TGA files. The result is files that are incompatible with most graphics applications, and that contain artifacts which are impossible to get rid of. See the transparency guide for more info on that.

And you'll find that the Wacom tablet will be well worth the money, by the way. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. " (Okay, he was talking about a Ferrari, but hey, if the shoe fits...)