Sculpting the Hair

 22/01/21 - Week 16

Sculpting the hair has been the trickiest part of the sculpt so far. I think I have redone the hair about 3 or 4 times now. I was firstly struggling with the texture I wanted to make. In my concept he has curly hair that is quite bouncy but obviously it would take me too long to create every strand by hand. If the hair was straight I may of considered that but since curly hair needs to be more unique in each strand I decided to model it as one with a few strands at the front. The texture was still a problem doing it this way since I couldn't quite get the effect I wanted. After doing the sculpt above I just felt that it looked like a brain or something of the sort, not really hair like. This was a bit disappointing since it took me a while to do the whole head since hair needs no symmetry. 

After trying a few more times I ended up using the inflate tool to try to push out some of the strands and make them look a bit smoother, this created a really nice effect and I started to use it a bit more and then cut into it to create the look of curly hair, the result looks way cleaner and more hair-like.

The next issue I ran into was the strands. The topology was getting way too messy and was getting too thin or just didn't look right. I solved this by starting over with the strands and trying to get the best topology all the way through the movement of them. I also used the polish and inflate tools to make the parts thicker and smoother when I needed them to be.

I am much happier with the hair now and I am also beginning to learn a bit more about how to topologize better in zbrush which is really useful and will definitely help me with the clothing, I am still a bit stuck on zmodeler but I will be using it lots with clothing so hopefully I will figure it out.