Hossein Moayed

Detective Focks

2021-06-13T16:31:00+00:00

This is my latest personal character that I’ve been developing for my story.

He is “Detective Focks,” a talented and ambitious private detective hired by Bonanno crime family to figure out the cause of their latest fatal nuisance happened while delivering an important cargo.

I hope you enjoy it.

Bonannos’ Train Cargo

2021-04-01T16:32:00+00:00

This is my latest personal project that I’ve been developing for a while.

A special deluxe private cargo train nicknamed “IL DORATO - the golden,” that belongs to Bonanno family in New York, 1901. The Bonanno crime family is one of the “Five Families” who dominate organized crime activities in New York and even generally are considered to be a big part of “American Mafia.”

Tips and Tricks: Using Substance Painter In Production

2021-01-13T22:34:00+00:00

Substance Painter is firmly integrated into pipelines of many animation/VFX studios around the world. As a texturing/look development artist in those studios, you have to tackle SP on a daily basis. I’ve been doing it, and decided to share 10 tips and tricks I picked up along the way.

Work Non-Destructively

The first one is really important, actually. You have to be flexible in terms of art-direction, like trying different looks and explore ideas rather quickly for the directors. To achieve that goal, you need to have control over every visual element you put on the screen. One of the best ways to get that control, is to let masking be in charge wherever you can. A simple example would be instead of painting directly on height channel, try painting a mask for a fill layer with height slider to control the depth whenever you want. Actually masking in Substance Painter could get really complex considering its powerful procedural system (even better when using Substance Designer along with SP) and the toolsets like of Generators or Anchor Points.
Create Your Own Library

Down the production pipeline, you will probably need the unique look you are currently spending your time on, again. Also sometimes there might be a gap between working on two similar assets. There could be lots of situations and possibilities in which you need your works from the past, so to keep it short, try to create a library for yourself. Like you could save a smart material everytime you finish a new asset to develop a good habit.
Create Your Own Output Template

Depending on your SP shader and target rendering engine, you may need to add or remove channels and the exported maps. It’s better to save multiple templates for different situations. It helps with consistency in the project.
Don’t underestimate Anchor Points

You can use Anchor Point to create more complex setups to have even more control over your look development project. The idea here is to reference different channels of a layer to another layer’s, which opens to lots of possibilities.
Keep Everything Organized

Always prepare the files as if another artist would continue on your work from tomorrow on, even if you know that’s not the case. By doing so, your files will be readable, editable and reusable by anyone in a robust manner. By not keeping organized, you would lose track of the project sooner or later. No need to mention how confused other artists who will work on the project would be.
Substance Painter Is A Preview

Even with the same environment light, what you see may be different from what you render in Arnold. It’s great for quick testing, but it shouldn’t be relied on. So don’t worry if what you see in other render engines, is different from SP. Technically, Substance Painter is all about getting the texture maps with the right colors, values and formats into the target platform.
Check On Every Channel Separately

Speaking of the right colors and values, checking each map separately will help you decide better on each one of them. For example see if there’s appropriate variation in actual roughness values. Checking each map also helps to prevent further issues or to debug.
Test All Assets Under Same Light Scenarios In Maya

The eighth tip could go a long way in terms of keeping the consistency and reliability of the overall look development and lighting of the project. In larger studios, look development/lighting teams, would have defined lighting setups and testing environments provided by the supervisors.
Add Final Touches In Maya

Depending on the pipeline, you can leave some of exaggerations, fine-tunings and adding variations to colors and values, for Arnold or generally speaking, rendering engines. Most changes of these natures, follow along while shading the assets.
Stay Consistent

This is really important in production; mainly because it gets much more readable to other people in the pipeline, and it makes toubleshooting or editing/directing much more predictable at anytime.

Tips and Tricks: How To Use Maya Transfer Attributes Smartly

2020-04-04T19:30:00+00:00

Maya’s Transfer Attributes function is probably something you should reconsider when it comes to using it your workflow. Because it’s awesome, and sadly often underestimated!

So today I’m gonna try to show you guys some examples of how we can use this function to save ourselves some precious time and also the variety of the things we could do with Transfer Attributes. Hopefully it helps you along with your projects.

How Maya Transfer Attributes Works

Much like other Maya functions, Transfer Attributes needs a target, and a source geometry. First, you have to select the source geometry, and then the target to which the transfer will be applied.

You can find Transfer Attributes in Modeling section under Mesh>Transfer Attributes. After you made your geometry selection click on the the Transfer Attributes options to see the window below:

the default settings

Think of the first part of the options as “WHAT” you want to transfer between geometries, and the second part as “HOW” you want the attributes to be transferred.

You can read the full documentation on each one of the options here.

On a daily basis, we have to keep an eye on a number of important stuff: Component IDs, UVs, Topology Changes, Spacing (world, local, etc.)

I’m gonna explain more on a couple of examples:

Case #1: Transferring UVs Between Meshes

There could be lots of scenarios, here’s the basic one plus a bit of information on other scenarios:

Here I have two meshes with the same topology, one with the right UVs and mouth closed, and the other, no UVs and mouth open. I want to transfer the UVs and also the shape to the other. Let’s go through some of the options we need and why.

**Vertex Position: On _**- I basically need this just because I want to make the lips closed in the new version. This option could be useful in combination with _Topology sample space when Component IDs have changed, therefore you can’t use Blendshapes.

**UV Sets: All _**- So I want to transfer everything about _UVs from the old model to the new one, right?

Sample Space: Component - This is usually the make-or-break part of this whole transferring. In this case, since I have the same topology and Component IDs, I chose component. If the Vertex IDs on models did not match each other, I’d use Topology option instead.

So these are the settings in this case.

Case #2: Transferring Vertex Normals

In this case, I just want to showcase an example of how we could actually put this option to good use.

So I have a hair made of hair cards for game engines. As you create strips of polygon hair, each strip has its own normals, naturally. In order to make them seamlessly blend into each other like real hair would do, specially in terms of creating smooth highlights, we should use transfer attributes.

First of all, merge all your hair cards into one geometry (target object), if you already haven’t. Then create a somewhat cylindrical dome-alike object to nearly match the outline of the hair. Now divide the dome to have really hi-res geometry. Then freeze transforms on both source and target objects. This is important since we’re gonna use World sample space.

You should have something similar to the image below.

The hair geometry (target) is sitting right into the dome geometry (source).

Now, for Transfer Attributes Options:

Vertex Normals: On - This is the main data that if transferred from the shape we just created, solves all the specular and seamlessness issues I mentioned before.

Sample Space: World - By choosing this option, “sampling normals” is done by evaluation of the absolute distance between the vertices. So, good for us!

Search Method: Closest To Point - This is the default option. Just make sure you don’t have the other option (Closest Along Normal) is not activated. Because it could cause some artifacts.

These are the settings in the second case.

Case #3: Using Transfer Attributes In Marvelous Designer Workflow

In this case I’m gonna demonstrate a cool trick to retopologize the clothes created in Marvelous Designer for further use in the pipeline.

We’re gonna need 3 geometries and 2 usages of Transfer Attributes.

These are the models we need.

So, now what we need to do, is to transfer UVs from the triangulated flat model (1) to the quads version (2). Then, we should be able to transfer vertex positions from the triangulated model (3) to the quad flat model (2). And that’s it.

For the first “Transfer Operation,” since our models are exactly on top on each other, we need to use World Sample Space to transfer the UVs.

For the second “Transfer Operation,” since our models share the same UV sets, we could use UV Sample Space to transfer the Vertex Position.

And now you have the quad version of your clothes model with perfect UVs to use in your project.

That’s all. Thanks for reading.

Young And Wild

2019-10-13T20:30:00+00:00

Young And Wild

I started this project a while ago, knowing that it’s meant to be 3D printed, I chose the following pipline.

The base mesh and posing were done in Maya. Then I brought the model to ZBrush, in order to add some details and refine the pose. Also I sculpted the hair from scratch in ZBrush.

Then I dynameshed the whole model with the right resolution, and further tweaked it for 3D printing.

For more and higher resolution images, you can visit my Artstation. I hope you like it.

Portrait of Sir Anthony Hopkins

2019-03-21T20:30:00+00:00

Finally, I decided to call this work done, otherwise I’d never knew when to stop working on it!

It was a fun project to work on, I learned a lot during this portrait study, and tried to cover both technical and artistic aspects of developing my skill sets.

I used Maya and ZBrush for modeling and sculpting, Mari for texturing, a combination of Texturing XYZ and hand sculpting for skin details, XGen for hair, Vray Next for rendering and Photoshop for final touches.

For higher resolution images, you can visit my Artstation at the bottom of this page. I hope you like it.

Nikolai

2019-03-08T20:30:00+00:00

The ZBrush 2019 version is awesome with a lot of cool features like NPR (Non-Photorealistic Rendering), Real Cameras, Subtool Folder Organization, and many more. Make sure you check it out.

Also I got a bit far from my ordinary works, and did this one in a more stylized fashion. Hope you guys like it.

I didn’t use any Photoshop work on these two, except for my signature. These are mere ZBrush shots.

The images below, show the model I used in combination with ZBrush’s NPR to get the results above.

For higher quality images, please visit my Artstation below.

Workflow: Controlling Stitching / Sewing Lines

2019-02-21T20:30:00+00:00

Having control over the sewing lines you sculpt in your character’s clothing, is crucial; because when it comes to texturing part of the pipeline, it will be important to be able to deal with them separate from the main clothing. By using this workflow, you can assign different color, material, dirt, etc. to the sewing lines separately, in Substance Painter.

The Concept

The whole idea, is simply to create a mask while sculpting in ZBrush. Then, when you import your model to Substance Painter, it’s just a matter of applying the created mask to the desired material. And BOOM! You’re in the driving seat!

Notes Before Starting

Your mesh has to have proper UVs.
We create the mask while sculpting, so if you already have your sculpt ready, this is not gonna work, naturally.
If you needed to change/optimize the mesh’s UVs after doing the sculpture, there’s nothing to worry about. The mask will be projected to your new mesh along with the sculpting details.

The Workflow

Before doing any sort of sewing line sculpting, bring the alpha of your brush[es] to Photoshop, and create a simple mask by painting white only on the sewing lines and leaving everything else black.

An example of creating the right mask for the sewing brush[es]:

Then import the created mask to the texture section of ZBrush and apply it to the texture of your brush.

Then fill your mesh with black (pick black color, then go to Color -> FillObject, with RGB ON on any brush), and turn on the RGB of your sewing brush, and sculpt while a white color is chosen. This way, when applying the sewing lines to the mesh, the white color will automatically be applied right on top of the sewing lines. This will ultimately be our mask that we’re gonna export to Substance Painter.

If you have trouble seeing your sculpting process, while in black, just click on the little “brush” button under the Subtool menu, beside the thumbnail of your mesh, to turn polypaint preview off. Now, you don’t see the white being painted, but don’t worry, it’s painting as long as you keep your RGB button ON while using your brush. You can click on that little “brush” button again, to make sure it’s painting.

When you finished sculpting, it’s time to export the mask. Before that, select your desired UV resolution under the UV Map in Tool palette. Go with maximum to have more control later. To export the map, click on New From Polypaint under the Create sub-menu under the Texture Map menu in Tool palette. Then click on Clone Txtr. After that, click on Flip V under the Texture palette and then export. The exported image is the one we use in Substance Painter.

Import the mesh and the exported map from ZBrush into Substance Painter. Add the material you want to use for the sewing lines, then right click on the assigned material, and click on “Add bitmap mask,” then select the imported mask. That’t it, now the material only works on your sewing lines.

Conclusion

I like this workflow because it’s fast and doesn’t necessarily need extra UDIM tiles.

Also, this showcased workflow, could be used for any sorts of similar things, like zippers; then you can assign metal material to that section in Substance Painter.

That’s it everyone. Thanks for reading. I hope you got something useful out of this article. Let me hear what you have to say. Getting feedback is what gets me going faster.

Cheers!

Tips and Tricks: The Right Way To Think About Doing Hair As An Artist

2019-02-16T20:30:00+00:00

Doing hair -regardless of the art type- has always been an interesting topic to talk about among artists; due to its daunting challenges on the way. No matter what type of 3D hair you’re creating (real-time, rendered or sculpted), the way of thinking about it, the concept, is the same.

Let me make it clear at this point that if you’re looking for quality output, there’s no fast ways around it, you have to be patient and spend your time, deal with it.

Now, I’m not gonna write any step-by-step guides, because you can find loads of them on Google, and good ones, too. However, I’m here to talk about how to catch a fish, rather than giving you only one fish.

This article is written because one of my Reddit subscribers asked me about some explanations on doing hair. Due to the loads of work and lack of time, I couldn’t create the images of this article myself. So the images shown in the context (not the header though), are other artists’ works and I have no claims on them.

An Artist-Friendly Approach To Sculpt/Groom Hair

The basic idea, is to think of it as a sculpting process. Meaning that you have to do the Primary Forms first, then nail down the Secondary Shapes and finally the Tertiary Details. I’m gonna explain about each one and how to figure out each pass. As I said before, it doesn’t matter what sort of 3D hair you’re creating. This way of thinking, applies to all.

Primary Forms

The primary forms, are the first step (after gathering and studying references which I’m gonna talk about in the end) of doing hair. If you ask about a clearer definition, I’ll put it this way: “The Primary Forms of hair, are the ones which define the overall volume of the hair, and the general silhouette (forget about the tiny fly-away hairs for now). The ones that are recognized by the audience if your character is in the darkness and there’s some light behind.”

The goal of this pass, is simply to cover most of the head and let no scalp skin be visible. Besides, to show the general recognizable hairstyle.

If you’re doing real-time hair, you’re gonna need a texture sheet that does have some thick groups of hair, so that it let almost no light through and cover the scalp skin. You can read more about creating game hair texture sheet, here.
If you’re using hair-groomers like XGen, it’s the same; depending on your desired hairstyle, you’ll need at least one separate description to cover the head and shape the general silhouette.
If you’re sculpting hair, it’s still the same; you have to somewhat forget about details and nail down the primary shapes.

This image above is a good example of primary forms of hair. By Adam Skutt

This one’s pretty basic. Obviously, there will be a lot more tweaking along the way. By Henning Sanden

Secondary Shapes

The Secondary Shapes, live inside the Primary Forms. At this stage, you’re gonna add a bit more definition on top of what you had before. To put it in a nutshell, take one of your references on Photoshop and blur it. See those lines?! They’re the Secondary Shapes.

By Henning Sanden

However, if you ask about the definition, I’ll reply: “The Secondary Shapes, are the ones that include hair breakups and the connectivity or the flow of the hair. They’re made of smaller strokes than the Primary Forms, and bigger ones than the Tertiary Details. They’re groups of hairs that are related to each other in a smooth flow.”

The goal of this pass, is to define the general flow of the hair, add a bit more detail to the silhouette and add color variations as well. This is where most of the fight-throughs happen as an artist. If you have this pass done, and blurred it in Photoshop and it still worked, you’re on the right track.

Just have this mind, that this pass should define big[ger] chunks of hair. Leave the tiny details to the final step. Don’t be obsessed with details too much for now. Try to focus on how those big chunks of hair are connected/related to each other, as this is a very vital step in the whole process.

If you’re doing real-time hair, you need a texture sheet with a few hair groups consisted of mid to low counts of hairs. Also you can add a bit more color variations to them. You can read more about creating game hair texture sheet, here.
If you’re using hair-groomers like XGen, you may need to add a few descriptions depending on the hairstyle, and also use modifiers like Clumping in a more visible, meaningful way.
If you’re sculpting, the procedure is the same. Since you’re doing it by hand, you have to pay more attention to the relationship of the hair chunks. Also, it’s easy to find yourself wasting your time on details too soon! Just… stay focused!

There will be a lot of back-and-forth process when sculpting hair. By Henning Sanden

It just works! By Henning Sanden

Tertiary Details

The Tertiary Details; this pass could be more time-consuming, but I gotta say if the previous passes have gone as you would like, this is the fun part. The Tertiary Details define, well, the tiny details like single hair strands, and the fly-away hairs added on the silhouette. This pass is also supposed to add more randomness and breakups to the hair.

Another important aspect of this pass could be on the hairlines. The way hair touches the head may not look good/natural until this step. You have to try to add more single strands/lower-count chunks of hair to where the hair meets the scalp. This is a huge step to the realism, which most artist either forget, or don’t pay too much attention.

If you’re doing real-time hair, you need your texture sheet to have a few hair groups made of low[er] counts of hair strands. Since every piece of hair card you add matters, choose the placement of the details carefully (as always, have an eye on the reference). Also pay attention to the transition of hairlines as it’s often in real-time hairs that hairlines looks so unnatural. Again, you can read more about creating game hair texture sheet, here.
If you’re using hair-groomers like XGen, you’ll probably need at least two descriptions, depending on your workflow. One for the hairlines, and one for the fly-away hairs and little details here and there.
If you’re sculpting, you just need to make your audience “feel” the material of the hair. You don’t always have to do every single hair strand, it’s almost impossible (not totally, it just needs tons of time!) in some ways. Choose the placement and the size of your strokes carefully.

Final game hair by Adam Skutt

This sculpture is stylized, but you still can see pretty well that how tertiary details are executed when sculpting. By Henning Sanden

Studying The References

As always, it’s crucial to gather a bunch of references for the hairstyle you’re going for. A way of quickly studying you references would be to open them in Photoshop, and trying to determine the Primary Forms, the Secondary Shapes and the Tertiary details by doing some paint-overs.

When studying, have that blur trick in mind. Blur you reference image, and draw on the main lines you see. That will be the Secondary Shapes. Whatever not noticeably visible, is in the Tertiary Details pass.

Also by doing so, you can -for example- have an idea of how many hair groups you need in your texture sheet for you real-time hair.

Reference study by Adam Skutt

Reference study by Henning Sanden

Conclusion

Note that the passes I talked about, are not totally separated processes and could be a back-and-forth workflow between them, which in most cases, it is. For example, you may need to adjust the Primary Forms while doing the Secondary Shapes. Just take your time, and don’t stick with what you already have. Don’t be afraid of changing, to be able push your art to the next level.

That’s it guys. I hope I was clear in explanation of the concept of breaking down the steps of doing all sorts of hairs. I’ll be happy to hear from you guys.

Cheers!

Workflow: How To Create Texture Map For Game Hair Cards Using XGen

2019-01-28T20:30:00+00:00

Game hair has always been an interesting topic to talk about because of all the challenges it produces along the way. Every artist have their own way of handling them. But in general, there are only a few methods in terms of creating the texture sheet. One robust and flexible workflow, is to use Maya’s XGen system. I know, XGen may seem a bit tricky to understand at first glance, but once you’re there, it’s really easy to get the most out of it.

I have to say though, since it contains a lot of steps, I can only go over important parts. But, the good news is I share some tricks as well, which may help you troubleshoot your situation.

The Ultimate Goal

In short, we need to render out an image like the one below (it still needs some work on it though):

We need thick hair, to create the silhouette and cover most of the head; thinner hair for adding breakups and tinier shapes, and finally some thin strand groups and flyaways to add more details to the hair.

Overall Workflow

We’re gonna use a simple plane geometry for every hair group to grow from, and then will hide them in the end. Then, go to an orthographic camera, like the front cam, and set the render output resolution to a square size. I’ll go with 4K, which means -as you know- 4096*4096. Then assign an appropriate hair shader to my XGen descriptions, and add some lights. Then we will render from there, to see what we got, and adjust it eventually to get the look we want.

General Tips On XGen

Before you jump into XGen, there are several general tips to be aware of:

Have your project address Set correctly in Maya. File -> Set Project…
Make sure you use Maya’s default materials on your geometry (in our case, the planes). So, for example only use Lambert, Blinn, etc. and don’t use Arnold’s materials. Because you’re gonna have trouble seeing the maps you paint on you geometry.
Make sure the name of the geometry you’re using as a base for hairs to grow from, is unique.
Make sure your mesh has UVs, and the UVs are on the first UDIM.
On your geometry, Delete History and Freeze Transforms before going further.
For more complex XGen usages, like using some nodes in Pixar’s Renderman that are used to colorize the hair by a painted map, it’s urgent that you have no spaces in anything related to your project, otherwise it won’t work. For example, no space in the name of the geometry, in the name of the description and collection, and in the address of your project as well. So, in general, avoid space in all the names when using XGen in your project.
Pick your rendering engine at the beginning and do a quick research about its integration with XGen. Some versions of Maya and rendering engines, have the issue of “Activating the rendering engine plugin before activating the XGen plugin.” So, have an eye on that as well.

Important Steps

Rotate the plane around 30 degrees in X direction (if you’re gonna use front camera as your render cam). This way, we can kinda mimic the head, and give the feeling as if it’s growing from somewhere.

Select the plane, and hit Create New Description. Pick a name name for your Description and Collection. Remember, no space.

The only option I change, is the Control the Primitives by, which I choose Placing and shaping Guides.

XGen needs at least 3 Guides to create a preview. So, place an shape them however you please. Just remember, if you Rotate the Guides themselves and not their vertices, when you’re done with it, click on Bake Guide Vertices under the Guides menu in the XGen window.

Paint a simple mask for Density. Just under the Density slider in the Primitives tab. Remember to hit save every time you make changes to every mask in XGen system. That’s how it works. If you forget to hit the save button, you won’t see the changes, because the PTex file hasn’t been generated.

In the Primitives tab, there are a couple of things to change.

First, adjust the Density slider as you see fit. Then there’s the Mask that I told you about.

Next, would be Modifier CV Count, which is basically the number of vertices on the generated hair. The more you put this value, the smoother the results will be. Also it will have a direct affect when it comes to Modifiers, which I’ll talk about later.

For the Width, a value around 0.35 is pretty accurate in terms of realism. Just for the hair sheet we’re creating, put the Width Ramp to something like the image below. The reason is, to make where the hair grow thinner, to create a more believable connection to the head late.

Taper pretty obviously, tapers the hair strands. Basically, it makes the hair like a pyramid, in which the tip is thinner than the root. Taper Start, defines at what point on the hair, the tapering will begin. For example, if you input 0.5 in there, it tells the computer to treat the hair normally from thr root to half, then from half point to the tip, eventually make the hair thinner.

If you have noticed, there a little script button in front of every slider. If you click on for example the script button of the Length, it will open a window, allowing you to add more randomness or anything you like to it.

Speaking of randomness, you can paste this code on the second line there to add more variety to the Length: $a * rand(0.8,1.2) What it tells the computer is to grab the length of every single hair, and multiply it by a random value between 0.8 and 1.2 to shorten or lengthen it. Obviously you can change the numbers as you like.

The great thing about XGen is you can do this little trick to almost everything that has that script button in front of it. Like Taper, Width, Taper Start, etc.

Next, I like to uncheck the Tube Shade option to be able to see the color of the hair a bit better in the viewport.

The Modifier CV Count that I mentioned earlier, was for the generated hair and not the Guides. If you want to add more points to the guides themselves, select them, and click on the Rebuild… button to input as many points as you like on your Guides. It helps a lot when it comes to shaping the hair.

I guess that’s all we needed in the Primitives tab.

In the Preview/Output tab, there are a couple of stuff to have an eye on.

The first being the Renderer under the Output Settings. This is where you tell XGen which rendering engine you’re gonna be using in the end.

Then there’s the Primitive Bound right underneath the Renderer. Just have this in mind that every time you change your hair, come here and click on Auto Set button before you render. To make sure that the hair boundary has enough space to include all the hair you’ve created.

This tab also includes the shader information. Its options varies depending on your renderer. So I say, sometimes it’s easier to just select the Description in the Outliner, and assign a material as you would normally do in Maya. Remember, select the Description, not the Collection or any other nodes there.

Welcome to the Modifiers tab. This is the fun part. Here, you can add details to the hair.

There are a lot of things you can do here, but let me talk about what I like to do in these situations.

I add two Clumping modifiers, the first one is the one with big broad clumps, the second one has more subtle clumps to add more details. Just have in mind that in order to use a Clumping modifier, after adding it, you need to click on Setup Maps… and Generate some sort of map to tell the computer where and how many clumps you need in your modifier.

Then, I add a Cut modifier to well, cut the hair tips to add more variety to it.

Then there’s Noise modifier, I like this one a lot because there are a lot of styling I can do only with this modifier. Play with the Magnitude, Frequency, Mask and other options to get what you need.

Next, I add a Coil, which basically has a spring-like effect on the hair. I kept it very low in my case, but you can try it out to see what you like.

Again, as I have mentioned before, the Modifier CV Count in the Primitives tab, comes to play here. The Noise and Coil modifiers for example, rely heavily on that. As with same values for them, if you change the Modifier CV Count number, you will see a different result.

You need to create a Description and do these steps for every hair group in your hair texture sheet. Each one with a different style and usage, and possibly a different material to add more variety to the color too.

Then, set your orthographic camera as if you’re seeing your texture sheet in it. Optimize the view, and have as little empty space as you can to be efficient.

Next, add a Directional Light [at least for start], check your Render Settings, and do a render to see what you get in your first try. Then from there, try to improve the results as much as you can.

About that Specular Map in the header image, it’s just a simple Ambient Occlusion applied as material to the hair Description. It still needs some heavy tweaks in Photoshop, but it’s almost there.

Conclusion

The best thing about this workflow, is its flexibility. You can come back later and change stuff as you or your art directors need. It’s also worth mentioning that this workflow is widely used in the industry level and I do the same with my professional works as well.

Generally speaking, the hair creation process is all about patience, it’s your best friend.

I guess that’s about it. Thanks for reading this article. Check out my other articles too, to see if there’s anything you like. I know you may have all sorts of questions. So don’t get lazy, ask them now in the comments.