Mens Hairstyles and Mustaches with C4D: Painting Hair Growth Density Maps

Photo of Eric Reed

Instructor Eric Reed

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  • Duration: 04:16
  • Views: 3754
  • Made with Release: 17
  • Works with Release: 17 and greater

Create and paint a texture on your character’s head to fade the density of hair growth.

Create a hair density texture map with BodyPaint. Use the brush tools to fade the growth near the sideburns, and back of the head.

Eric Reed is a CG Specialist with Hive-FX, a Portland, OR-based VFX studio. Hive-FX made a name for itself creating gruesome effects for the TV series Grimm on NBC. In that process, they've mastered all sorts of ways of turning people into monsters, including the use of Cinema 4D Hair. Other clients include Nike, Razorfish, Empire Green Creative, Wieden and Kennedy, Riddell and Microsoft. www.hive-fx.com

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Transcript

- Hi. In the previous video we shaped our guides. In this video we're going to paint our maps. The first thing we need to do is go to BP UV Edit Paint. Once in this mode, let's stock our menus. This way everything will be available to us. We need to create a material to put the texture on. To do this, let's double click in the materials panel. In the material, under texture, go to Create New Material. Let's set the color to black but let's make these 4k textures. Okay. Once that's done, hit OK and your texture will be created. It will be black in the UV area, but the skin doesn't change. We need to apply the material to the skin. Also we need to check the X box, which will allow us to paint on the object. Okay. Instead of painting from scratch, we're going fill the selection. Let's double click on our Selection Tag and let's also go to UV Face Mode. This allows us to use the layer Outline Polygons. We're also going to need to fill polygons because when you zoom in, you see the faces are still empty. If you were to do Fill Polygons, there would still be borders around where the edges are. So we need to do both. Okay. Now we have a template to work with. Let's grab our brush tool. Let's set the color to black. Adjust the size and pressure and begin painting. I like using Projection Mode just because it equalizes the size of the brush. If we don't use projection mode, it will skew based upon how square your UVs are. Our UVs aren't that great in the back of the head, so projection works quite well. So we're going to just trim down and get the basic silhouette of where the hair is going to grow. We want it to be better than what we did for the guides but we don't want to have to come back and edit it quite as much as the guides. We can. I just prefer not to. Also, when using projection painting, it's important that you don't cut off your paint stroked by having something in the way. Projection painting is very view dependent. Okay, let's finish this up real quick. Okay. The nice thing about displacement maps and any map that you're going to use in C4D is it also accepts gradients. So let's get some neck hair going down in some of these peaks. If we reduce our pressure and our size a little bit, let's paint in some grays. So when we have the gray areas in our map, our density map is going to work with the white being full density and black having no hair at all. Gray will fit somewhere in between, depending on where your gradient lies. Let's save our texture. Use Save As and let's make it a JPEG. Let's call this "Head Density Map." I always give these maps a version number. In the next video, we're going to be looking at the part in the hair. Because of this, we're also going to be painting a second displacement map. Thanks for watching.
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