Hair Care Tips

I've been playing around with the idea of creating hair recently....I think I can do a fair job of it at this point. But the thought of making multiple colors and keeping track of what textures go where? Argh. Instant headache.

Are there any builders out there who could give a few tips? How do you keep track of all of it? Especially with detailed, high-prim styles (though, admittedly, sculpties can take care of a bit of the prim counts).

Hi there
I have not tried hair but Cassini Creations makes a great retexture script that I bought and it's perfect for changing all the hair textures.
You have a little work to do at first putting a script into each prim, but after that first part it's pretty automatic!
I used it for a fur shrug and it worked great, although I would suggest if you have a ton of flexis in it to put the scripts into them right from the beginning if you can otherwise it's a pain to try and select each individual one afterwards.

I'm not doing hair... but I do versions of other things and have dozens of files associates with a product. In my case I use folders with the same name in SL and on my workstation.

I also use a common folder for products that share common files. Several bed frames my use the same mattress and covers. So, my main folder is beds. Inside 'Beds' there is a folder for each bed and a folder labeled 'common' or 'shaired'.

I'm not sure I would want sculpty hair. Think about what it looks like before the sculpt map loads fully .... for other people that is, who haven't seen you before and haven't got it cached! First impressions and all that.

First impressions not withstanding, what about server load and lag? I'm all for making a good first impression but I also want to do whatever I can to cut down on server lag. A lot of people wear clothing and items that have MASSIVE amounts of prims. It's not fair to lag out a server just so people can oogle you.

That being said, is there such a thing as sculpty hair? I have yet to see any being sold in-world.

I guess you can save a lot of hair prims with sculpties, see the screen shots below. The prim counts that'll follow are for the hair on the skull only (excluding the pony tail):

- Hair on the female character: 15 prims
- Hair on the male character: 2 prims

I use plane sculpties for this. The male character's hair is only two prims, because it uses alpha textures. They hardly alpha fight (z-fight) because I've stumbled over a technique that eliminates alpha fighting within one prim (the prims still alpha fight each other, of course, so I need a tricky overall prim layout to minimize the overall alpha fighting).

While I only spent a short time on the hair, and it hardly is a shining example of hair style design, it might demonstrate nicely what can be done with sculpties in order to save prims.

Here's what I do when starting a new hair I'm pretty sure I'll want different colors of...
Use small linksets for the main parts (scalp base, crown, bangs, back, left & right sides as needed), and build them so that only 1 texture is used per linkset. Might have to do an extra linkset for a certain area if you have different textures to use on some of the pieces.

Do the base first, add an additional long skinny prim to that part (to make selecting it easier), then duplicate it and move the copy away. Here's the key: tint the copy set a unique color.. that color will relate to the texture used on ALL of that little piece - write it down lol (eg- neon green = base tex/no alpha, or red = bangs alpha). Now you can fit the textured pieces of the next section to the original base (remembering to only do the pieces that all use the same texture per set). Add a long selection prim to the new part (use a different direction), then box-select all and UNselect the base, link, duplicate and move away. Then tint the copy according to the texture it uses (different texture = different color, same = same) and align it on the tinted copy base.

If you keep going this way, you'll end up with a multipart master thats easy to put all together and remove the selection prims. You'll also have a color-coded, aligned, working model which is painfully easy to retexture (by using the selection prims and swapping like textures on each linkset part). No screwing around trying to cam inside the thing to select that one buried prim either

Those pictures are pretty awesome Leben O.o!

Did you make those or did you happen to buy them from a content creator? Those avatars are pretty flippin' impressive too!

I'm curious as to how the texture was applied to the sculpty pieces for the male wolf. There's obviously an alpha used on the ends of the hair to get that transparent taper right?

If you made that yourself, could you tell us the steps you took to make it?

Everything you see on the shots has been done by me. Well, except the wooden floor of my building platform

As for the wolf's hair: it's a folded plane sculpty with an alpha texture on it. Took me about a month to research, but eventually I stumbled over a geometry layout that doesn't alpha fight (within the sculpty). However, I don't know why that is, so it's hard for me to do a tutorial.

Instead, attached is a screen grab from Maya that shows how I modeled these pieces. It allows for several layers of alpha textures that do not fight or flicker in any way - ideal for hair and fur effects. The effect breaks when the "flanks" of the sculpty are distorted too much. I haven't found out the exact rules yet.

And, as i mentioned, if you put several of these objects close to each other, they still alpha-fight against each other. But with a careful layout you can achieve fur/hair effects that have not yet been seen in SL (at least by me).


Edit: more complete shots of these avatars can be found here: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/lebenschnabel/