Prim Hair

Well, I can't figure out for the LIFE of me how I'm supposed to make it. I get the idea that it is a bunch of prims put together to look like hair and it allows a lot more diversity, but can anyone show me maybe a tutorial or something of how to make some different styles. I don't mean make other people's styles, I don't want all your secrets, just tips on how to do it. What a basic prim hair texture should look like for say highlights or tips of hair etc etc. I did a search, but I can't find anything ;_;.

So, any hints/tips/faq's/suggestions?

I suggest that you purchase some prim hair - particularly from a source that will let you copy and modify - and that you drag it out onto the ground and examine the techniques they employed. That being said, I do not recommend that you attempt to copy anybody's design - this would be wrong on a lot of levels - but there is nothing wrong with looking at somebody's design and trying to learn from it.

I've seen some great low prim-count stuff where slider-based hair forms a solid base with a few strategically placed prims supplementing it. Often looks better than all-prim hair.

torture, torture, torture: take a cube, twist it, skew it, scale its top down etc etc

scaling the top down is usually important to get the textures to look right.

texture are really, really, really important. paint hair in a texture starting solidly at the root, but give the last little bit at the tip some alpha to give it a rougher edge - you know, the way your real hair breaks up into seperate strands all with slightly different lengths. drop that texture onto a cone with the alpha at the tip of the cone - now torture.

The torus is a useful shape for creating hair, especially given the large number of options that exist for reshaping a torus. If you change the beginning and ending Cut values for a torus, you can turn it from a donut into a short, curved segment that works well as a basic building block for hair. With a texture applied that goes from completely opaque on one end of the cut torus to completely transparent on the other, you can layer a number of toruses to build convincing hair.

Other shapes that can provide useful hair parts are spheres and cylinders. When cut, resized, and carefully textured, pretty much any curved prim can be useful for hair. Straight prims, such as boxes and prisms, are less useful for most hair. Even straight hair tends to follow the contours of the head, and heads are round, not square.

One word of warning, however: try not to overdo it. The torus is the single most math-intensive primitive Second Life can render, even moreso when you start twisting, cutting, and alpha-texturing it. Try to keep your hair down to a reasonable number of prims, say twenty or so, and people will be much happier with you. It's no fun to have to stand with your back to someone because their hair turns SL into a slideshow.

If you're looking for a good artistic approach to take when building hair, it's often useful to have a photograph of a real hairstyle from which to draw inspiration. Look for parts of the real-world hairstyle that form simple geometric shapes, and try to model those shapes. A very simple example is the Beatles or Mr. Spock bowl cut, the base of which could be modeled with half a sphere. From this base, you can add smaller prims to give the hairstyle some variety; even with a ton of hairspray, there will usually be some stray bits of hair that don't conform to a perfect geometric solid.

Try not to build individual strands of hair; that will only end up looking like spaghetti, or worse, killing frame rate because you've used too many prims. Individual strands of hair are best left as an illusion provided by the texture you apply to the hair. A good hair texture will be solid and opaque at the roots, fading to fluffier ends, with full transparency at the very end of the texture. Depending on the look you're going for, you may want the strands in the texture to be mostly the same length (for tight, well-groomed hairstyles), or wildly variant (for frizzy, unkempt, or teased styles).

Be sure to leave plenty of room on the transparent end of the hair texture. If you only leave a thin band of transparency, you'll probably end up seeing a small stripe hanging in mid-air past the ends of the hair. This happens because all textures in SL repeat, and in this case, the repeat has wrapped the solid end of the hair texture onto the prim. You can correct for this by carefully changing cut values or texture repeats and offsets, but it's a lot easier when you have plenty of blank space to work with at the end of your texture.

Don't forget the basic avatar hair, either. I've had great success with using the avatar appearance sliders to make a good basic shape for the hair, then adding prims to attach pigtails and cowlicks to the avatar hair. Avatar bangs aren't bad, either, if you're looking for something reasonably flat and symmetrical.

Note that the hair texture provided by Linden Lab on the Second Life website is a template meant for retexturing avatar hair, not for creating prim hair. There is no need to hurt your brain attempting to make a hair texture to fit the odd shape of the hair template if you only plan to attach your hair texture to prims. The hair template has alpha transparency around all its edges, which will result in an ugly mess if you attempt to use it for prim hair. Your best bet is a simple square texture, solid at one end and transparent at the other.

Alright guys, thanks so much for all the advice, I'll try it out ^^