How about a hair tutorial?

[wippit]

SO here I am, trying to design an avatar for a japanese game I'm in. And I actually do pretty good, given the lack of talent I have. Until I get to... the hair....



I originally wanted long hair sorta blowing in the wind, that didn't work, so I tried for the bangs covering one eye... this is the best I got, and I don't think it looks so great.

How do you people manage to pull off hair so well?

[NEO|Phyte]

Time, patience, and loads of swearing.

Once I'm back home, I'll post something more useful.

[Omen]

OMG!! Yes!! Please... Hair, Lines, etc. turorials would be great! Anything you feel you are really good at. Share the wealth for us want-to-be-great avatar makers.

Thanks. (Sorry for the over excitement at first but I find this a great idea. :D

[Aeyamar]

OMG!! Yes!! Please... Hair, Lines, etc. turorials would be great! Anything you feel you are really good at. Share the wealth for us want-to-be-great avatar makers.

Thanks. (Sorry for the over excitement at first but I find this a great idea. :D

It's a bit disconcerting to here the person who's supposed to be designing my avatar say that.

[Omen]

Don't get me wrong, I feel I do ok but there are tons of tricks that I could learn to become better. For example I just learned today, thanks to another avatar maker mentioning it, that you can make patterns for fill colors.

I learned alot from that. Makes my life simpler. If only I could figure out why some patterns come with the avatar to Gimp from Inkscape and others appear clear I would be all set :-/

It's things like that, that I am hoping to get from a thread like this. ;)

EDIT: Specific question on Inkscape and Gimp. I made 2 patterns in an avatar. When I opened it in Gimp to do transparent BG and convert it, one pattern came through fine... the other did not. I thought it was because I 'underlayed' the good one but when I tried it with the second, the same happened. Suggestions?

[NEO|Phyte]

Ok, a basic picture-themed hair-making tutorial, by yours truely.

Step one: Prepare the head.

Self explanatory, make the circle that you intend to add hair to.

Step two: Basic hair shape.

If you know the kind of hair you want, use the line tool to make a shape in the rough outline of what you want. In this case, I'm going with hair blowing in the wind. For uberspikey anime hair, I've found that using multiple seperate shapes works rather well. Thats how I did most of the hair in my Dominic Deegan section of my avatar gallery (see link in sig)

Step three: adjusting basic settings

the color/outline settings of your hair.

Step four: shape adjusting

The fun stuff! Use whatever your program's modify object tool is called to start making your hair look more like hair. Dont worry about getting it perfect at this stage, just get it more-or-less accurate to what you want.

Step Five: other facial features

Get some more face bits in there so that you have a better idea of how the hair needs to look to be more natural looking.

Step Six: Final tweaking

Let your inner perfectionist run wild! Make minor tweaks to the hair object until Cthulhu comes to eat the shredded remains of your sanity.

[Omen]

Great tutorial! I was wondering if you, or another helpful sole, could address a hair issue I have. I am 'ok' with what I call 1/4 turned faces such as yours and frontals. It's when I am trying to do the 2/3 turned heads that drives me crazy. What I mean is if you move the eyes slightly right until you would expect to see some hair on the left of the head and how to work that into a realistic (for a stickman or stickwoman... have to be PC ;)) presentation.

Thanks.

EDIT: Hair attempt

[ILOVEOOTS]

wow thats alot better then the last hair!!!!! :o

[Omen]

Well, umh, thanks. But, I bet mine took three times as long to do and thats considering that NEO|Phyte made several screen caps. I am getting better though and it is do to practice and thanks to ppl like NEO squaring me away.

Thanks NEO!

[hyikim]

sodipodi?

oh, and could someone please show good still stick hair styles (like not blowing in the wind)?

[Chris the Pontifex]

I can add some tips here, for about 90% of my avatars I use multiple objects for the hair

I'm using inkscape, sodipodi isnt that much diifferent and I'm pretty sure this'll work for that other program too

prerequesits for this tuto:
- you know how to draw hair as in the post above
- know how to use object order
- skills: computer use 2 ranks, craft vector image 1 rank,
- abilities: dex 8, int 12

I wont be doing advanced hairstyles now, maybe later

ok, what we'll be going for:


We need the hair to be in front of the face and behind his back. While his face cant be behind his body. sort of hair < body < face < hair.

as you can see we need two layers of hair. Here's how we'll do that.

still bald:

We draw the outline without regard of what is in front or behind his shoulders. (I used two different objects for the right and the left)

we duplicate both outlines (ctrl+d in sopo or inkscape)
DO NOT MOVE THE DUPLICATES, I just did it to show I duplicated.
We move one set of hair to the back, this will make up the part of the hair behind the shoulders

enter node editing mode for the hair that is still up front:


remove the nodes below his shoulder and split the path to remove the line there:


what you'll have now:


do the same for the left:


add some details and you'll get:

[Chris the Pontifex]

hey I really enjoyed making that, If you think I should do more hair or other issues such as cloaks / robes / capes / etc - tutorials please tell me.

[Omen]

I would absolutely love a tut on pattern filling, ie how to make a pattern and save it for filling objects. I got the jist of it but when I port it into gimp I lose the pattern 90% of the time and can't find any difference that I might have done the other 10% of the time.

I would also like to provide tuts if anyone has any question on some of my avatars. The reason I say this is because of all the help I got trying to do avatars, I would like to repay the forum members.