Applying and Grooming Hair

Hair

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Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Hair and Cloth Tutorials > Hair > 

Styling Hair with a Spline Emitter

Some hairstyles, particularly longer ones, lend themselves more naturally to spline interpolation than surface growth. Spline-based hair gives you explicit control inside 3ds Max over a finite set of guide hairs. When you create hair with a spline object as the growth source, Hair creates a guide from each spline in the object. It then uses these guides as cross-sections to create hair growth. Essentially, you're creating a three-dimensional “sheet” of hair in the shape of the spline cross-sections.

For success with spline-based hair, keep these important requirements in mind:

• Hair growth is interpolated between each pair of successive splines. The best way to ensure that splines are in the proper order is to create the splines that serve as the hair outline as separate objects, and then attach them all together in the correct order.
• Interpolation between pairs of splines is linear, so use as many splines necessary to create a rounded look for your hair.
• The first vertex in each spline serves as the hair root, so when you create the splines, start at the base of each hair.

In this tutorial, you'll create two different spline objects, both comprising a number of Line splines, to create a woman's hairdo. The hairdo will have bangs in the front, with a flip on the sides and long, straight hair in the back.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

• Create spline objects on which to base hair growth
• Use vertices to give hair its shape
• Fine-tune hair characteristics
• Apply hair presets to objects

Skill level: Intermediate

Time to complete: 1 hour