- basic example: creating a description
- horse hair charm: creating different thicknesses for hair, hair chunks and hair cards
- first beard: creating a scalp, different hair cards - flyaways etc. Different map exports and edit in marmoset. - issues faced, how i could improve
- second beard - Using curves to create descriptions, adding twist- how to make a bun and how to make a braid. issues with ahir placement and what i could improve on
- lady-
- final: using previous techniques, applying them to my model, what I acheived, what could have been done better.

Methodology
Practice:

It was crucial that I understood the basics of XGen before creating hair for my own character. Using a Udemy Course, I went through the workflow to create a horse hair charm, two different types of male hairstyles and a female with hair. Repeating this process four times helped me familiarise myself with the creation of descriptions, texture maps and hair cards. This pipeline gave me a basic understanding of the complexity and time investment involved in producing realistic hair. These hair testes were then rendered in Marmoset and then the later attempts were then rendered in Unreal Engine 5.

Testing XGen.
This initial test was just a way to familiarise myself on how to create descriptions and render using arnold. There was no particular outcome other than practical means to understand the workflow involved.

The first step to creat hair, is to create hair descriptions using XGen in Maya. The steps are as follows:

1. There are quite a few ways to create a description, for this example I used the drop down menue at the top of the UI "generate" and select 'description'. A pop up menue will appear (figure...)


3. In this instance, the New description name would be Hair_Desc and where it says Create new collection named: add Hair_coll. The program will read this filing system as the description asset being held in the hair collection. Further descriptions made will be added to the Hair_coll file unless a new one is made.
4. At the bottom of this menue under the control the primatives by: menu select placing and shaping guides. this allowed me to manually place guides.
5. Now that the description was assigned to the plane, the XGen editor will open up to the right of the ui.
6. I added hair guides by clicking icon and the clicking where on the plane I wanted the guides to be, they can be as randomly spaced as needed. If a hair guide needs to be moved, hover over it, press ctrl, click it and move it into position, or delete it from the outliner if you want it removed completely.  then to generate the hair strands press the eye icon 
7. Secelct all the descriptions form the outliner and press fn 7. this will activate vertex mode on all descriptions which can be manually lengthened to the desired length using the move tool. when the hair guides are moveds into thefinal shape press the eye icon to regenerate the hair. The programme will try and interolate between each guide.
8. in the primitives shelf on the right, there are different As is the hairs were too stiff, the CV count was increased to 10 to make the hair strands smoother by addidng more points to it.

5 CV count:

10 CV count

This also gives more detail when adding noise to the hair (left 5CV count, right 10CV count)
this can be found in the modifiers section:

ajusting the taper and the on both

in its simplest form hair strands are created by following the process above.

the next section will be split into 4 proejcts, these were done to prepare myself for my final work ensuring that I am familiar with the programme.

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Horse hair charm:

This initial test, while basic in scope, provided a valuable and instructive example of creating and manipulating hair cards. Hair cards, being flat planes with hair strands applied as a material, require the creation of hair chunks to convincingly convey volume.

The planes on each hair card, do not have any twist added to them therefore they are quite evidently flat and catch the light head on rather than the light refracting at different angles.

For the hair charm exercise I created three descriptions. Different types of maps generated for the hair textures

A generic bust was used that was taken from Zbrush and manipulated to look more masculine. Although I wont be creating a male character for the final result, it was good practice to understand the different textures of hair and its placement. The results were rendered in marmoset. Maps created below:

Hair strands needed to be thicker and have more taper at the roots.
More of a hair variety needed to get better looking hair
I am aware that it is quite terrible nad need to work on it
I found lighting in marmoset a bit difficult.

Pics of process

Next hair project.

More familiar with the software and placing hair cards and making hair chunks.

Really struggled using unreal engine.
Created a very basic stencil in maya outlining how many hair cards I would like and the dirtecion and shape of the hair.
This was then imported into maya and assigned to a square plane where it was used as a guide to create hair cards.

This a a good way to create hair cards as it allows for more precision.
Another plane was used for the base of the hair description and placed at the roots.

Use the ep curve to trace some of the hair strands, depending how thick you want to hair card to be, so start with around 4 ep curves. Once one is done select the ep the plane go into the Xgen section and create a description. Once done select the ep curves and then the new plane description and then go to utilities in the xgen tab and click curves to guides.

Hair cards too thick at the rooth this time and too thick in general. Also I made the colour too dark.

I think i got better at placing the hair cards but still a lot of work to be done. For unreal only 4 maps were needed:

Alpha map
Depth map
Root map
ID map

I need to play around with the settings on unreal a but more.

The hair was too dark in maya and I couldnt really see where I was placing thehair cards when I was layering them and faced issues when rendering in unreal:

Tips of the beard probably needed to be more stragly