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ResPower Super/Farm™ - Blender Tutorial : Particle System for Hair

By: Cory King

Edited By: Sarah Gates

Overview

This is a tutorial for using the particle system in Blender 2.46.

This tutorial covers the basics of generating hair using particles in Blender. It is mainly aimed at those who have little or no experience with these tools. Plenty of screenshots and intermediate .blend files will be provided so that readers can follow along and a .blend file of the finished product will be provided at the end.

While my aim is to provide some insight for those interested in using Blender, I am by no means a Blender expert. I will almost assuredly do some things in the most inane and impractical fashion you can imagine, so be prepared. My goal here is to get something that works well enough, not to change the world with groundbreaking new techniques.

You can obtain a printer-friendly version of this page by clicking here .

Some preliminary steps before you begin:

Get Blender. It's hard to use a Blender tutorial if you don't have the software. Version 2.46 was the latest as of this writing, and screenshots will reflect this.
If you would like to use the ResPower Super/Farm™ to greatly reduce render times for your animations, go to the main page and click 'new user'. Then get a Blender subscription. They are cheap and allow unlimited rendering, both really good things.
Take a patience pill. Blender is a very powerful piece of software, but getting used to all of its quirks can be frustrating. When you want to take your mouse and hit it with a sledge hammer because clicking the right mouse button never does what it should do, step back, take a breath, and think happy thoughts. Then try from a different approach.

Getting Started

The Head -
For our purposes, a fully modeled head with lots of interesting detail and realism is just not very useful. Hair looks pretty much the same on a balloon as it does on a head (though I'm only guessing since I've never actually seen a hairy balloon) so we'll be using a slightly oblong sphere. I'm not going to go through the process of creating an oblong sphere. If you are that new to Blender, I suggest an intro to Blender that I wrote or any of the excellent pages linked from blender.org. So, use a UVsphere with the default 32 and 32, then scale it so that you get something like this.

Got it? Good.

Creating hair meshes -
With you head (I'll be calling the oblong sphere a head from now on) selected, move into edit mode. What we are going to do is select a mesh of faces from which we want hair growing, copy those faces, and separate them to a new object. So, in edit mode, choose the "face select" option in the toolbar and select faces where you want hair on the head. I'm making the classic "hair club for men failure" with nothing on top and a nice thick ring around the sides that's just begging to be combed up and over. Here are the faces I'm selecting. The first view is from the front, and the next is from the side.

This should give us a nice nice little glimpse into the future. Now, we need to move these faces into their own object so that when we apply hair to that object, it will only show up where we want. So, with faces still selected, hit Shift+d to copy the selected faces, then right click the mouse so that you don't move them anywhere. You will get this.

Now press 'p' and choose "Selected".

What happened? Your faces disappeared. As usual, you did something wrong... ok, no you didn't. In fact, your faces are still there, you just can't see them because you are in edit mode, and edit mode only shows the faces, edges, and vertices of the actively selected object. Since you moved the faces you selected into a new object, they don't show up. So move into edit mode by pressing 'tab' and POOF! ... you still get nothing. Never fear. I have not lead you astray. Your new object is there, you just still can't see it. This is because the location of your new object is still in exactly the same place as the sphere you split it from. To select your object, move to back view (Control + numpad 1) and start right clicking where your mesh should be. It may take a few tries, but you should get something like this.

To avoid confusion from here on, with your hair object still selected, move into top view and scale the mesh up just a tiny bit so that it isn't exactly on top of the head. The difference won't be noticeable in the finished product, and it will make it much easier to find and select your hair object in the future. Now you will have something like this.

At this point, I should tell you that these steps are done here just a bit backwards. It might be more useful in the future to copy your mesh, scale it immediately, then move it into a new object. I did it in the order of copy, separate, scale here because I feel that's a more natural way to think of the process, and thus a better way to learn the steps. The choice is, of course, yours in the future.

Particle Man -
Since we want the outline of our hair to be relatively smooth, let's use the "smooth" mesh tool and apply a subsurf. Move into edit mode and the editing panel (F9) and press the button that says "Smooth" in the Mesh Tools box. Now look over at the Modifiers box and add a subsurf modifier with 2 levels. You should get this.

This is a good place to hand out a .blend file since all we've done up to this point is regular Blender modeling, so happy birthday, here's your .blend file.

Now, time to add some particles. Move into object mode and then into the object panel (F7). Blender 2.46 has a few buttons just to the right that look like ... well they don't really look like anything but buttons, but if you hold your mouse over the orange and yellow one, a label pops up that says "Particle Buttons". Click it and you'll notice there really isn't much in the panels to begin with. This makes sense, since particle simulations really shouldn't be enabled by default. There is a panel called "Particle System" with a button that just says "Add New". Click it and you get this.

We want hair particles for our hair (obviously), so press the button that says "Emitter" and change it to "Hair". Bump the spinner labeled "Amount" up to about 25,000. We want this guy to have thick hair on the sides.

In the physics panel, hit the normal button once. Your head now has hair! Click on the random button a couple of times to make his hair look a little more loose. If you get jumpy and hit the render button now, you will get something like this.

It's not bad, but it's also not what we are looking for. To fix this, we will texture our object to get a nice variable brown color to our hair.

Texturing -
Did anybody get the They Might Be Giants reference from the last section? Nerds. While still in object mode, move into the shading panel (F5). If no material is present, hit the button that says "Add New". Now hit the texture button (F6) and hit the button that says "Add New". Choose "Noise" from the Texture Type dropdown, then move back to the Material Buttons panel. Now, mimic all of these settings (or something close to them).

Really all you need to change is the three color selections and the specularity tuner. We want our hair to be completely brown with very little shininess (specularity). Render, and you'll get something like this.

Salt and Pepper -
At this point, our hair is presentable. Not exactly professional quality, but I dare say it is a decent starting point on the path to professional quality. One small improvement we can make with relative ease is to add a little gray around the edges. Since most men start looking "distinguished" before their hair turns completely gray, we will give our head some gray hair just around his temples. The process here is just a repeat of what we've done up to this point, so I'll give you a quick overview, show you the finished product, and leave the middle part up to you as an excercise. Select the main head mesh again and split off some faces into a new object. This time, only select the faces that are around the temples of your head. Copy the faces, split them off into a new object and scale them up a bit. Then add particles to this surface the same way you did with the other, only this time add fewer particles and leave their color white. In the end, you should get something like this.

With this technique of layering different patches of hair, you can get just about any kind of hair you can imagine. Here's the finished .blend file.

Conclusion -
These are the absolute basics for the Blender particle system. There are more features than I can name that I don't understand at this point, but I am learning every day, just like you. If you have criticisms/improvements you would like to see made to this page, or if you have questions/comments of any other kind, I can be reached at support@respower.com. Thanks for reading, and happy Blendering!

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