Week 43 - In Plain Sight, Sol Hair Research & Yarn Proxy

This sprint I spent a majority of my time working on secondary character art needs such as working out the workflow for Sol's hair, breaking down Metahumans for their parts, and designing the first proxy of the Yarn Ball character.

Hair Research

For our style, I spent some time looking at In the Valley of Gods, specifically with their character Zora, on how they do hair. This turns out to be a multi-layered approach with a basic mesh and hair cards stacked ontop of them

For this, Ive been testing out both Ahoge and GC Curves as Maya Plugins to see what the best way to get the volume we need for a coiled hair texture. This process started with a mesh volume, then converting that into a random number of curves with Ahoge. Then processing those curves into either cards or tubes to be textured.

Currently Im working with Fibershop to make proper hair alphas/curls, however I need more time with the program to create the effect I really need.

For the Barista, I took one of my Metahumans from a personal project, extracted the face, hands and hair at their lowest subdivision, and reconnected them in Maya. Alongside this fixing other notes that Jocelyn and Jordyn had for me.

Metahuman head raw.

The yarn has been tricky from the start since there are not many good references for how a yarn character should look. I did my best to create a rounded cube and then extrude out segments wrapping around to create individual strings. I used a material in Zbrush to see how a similar shader to the one we're making would affect it.