Easter (not so) break - Modeling/Texturing Cho's Hair

Cho's hair needed to be done, not previously knowing how to model their hair Anna and Jake decided the best and most simple way was to model the hair as one simple block shaped appropriately, which would be taken into mud box and Zbrush to be further sculpted to get a better shape. Then to be re exported and modelled further in maya. Anna's hair looks really nice from what I've seen and the texturing looks nice also, however i went at it from a slightly different approach, i didn't use Zbrush to sculpt and i needed to pay more attention to the texturing of her hair because is was lighter, showing off the texture more. My 1st attempt to model Cho's hair was pretty bad, as you can see it looked like a sack on her head. this came from following the hair style in the original concept drawing, but it clearly was not going to work with the approach the group was going with for the hair styles of the girls.


I though about different styles i could give her, i really like Anna's bunches, the way they tail off to a point is the best way around the issue of not having a clump of hair, but that wouldn't suit Cho, nor did we want them to have the same hair. I came up with the short bob, which we all thought looked nice and suited the character, so i went about refining it and giving Cho a head band. I did all the shaping in maya, then exporting it into mud box to texture.


the fringe and side burns are two separate UV maps as they are both alpha maps. mud box has some good preset brushes which i used to paint the hair. starting with the fringe i just built up the texture in a series of layers, which i then exported into Photoshop and merged them into a single layer. for the alpha map i used the eraser tool in Photoshop to work away the blunt fringe, but it was looking lame. i looked at Anna's alpha and i saw that she might have done hers using the smudge tool. Using hers as a base, i used the warp tool to manipulate her alpha to loosely fit within my UV map for Cho's fringe. I then worked into it from there with a smudge tool until i got something that looked nice for Cho.


I went on to paint the main part of Cho's hair, going about it the same way i did with the fringe, working up layers to get a good texture using the mud box default brushes. As I painted it I made my brush strokes work with the flow of the geometry to get as natural a looking hair, in our stylized form, as possible. I lastly painted the alphas for the side burns, again using the smudge tool in Photoshop to get the wispy look i wanted.