Last year I almost spent my entire free time learning Unreal Engine 4 and ways to improve the process to make hair cards for real-time renders. Besides that I’ve decided to put my last work, the Korean Girl, inside the engine.
Now that I’m in the middle of this work, I’ll try to publish here some pieces of this process. I hope you like it! Feel free to send me any criticism, alright?!
Reference Panel
I’ve always started this work searching for the reference that I considered good for me to put inside my character. First of all I create a reference panel and, after some searches, I go to Photoshop to simplify how those hair cards should be.
xGen
After finishing this part, I spend a lot of time recreating what I’ve imagined for the hair using xGen inside Maya.
I've baked my hair project using xNormal, following the amazing Andrew Giovannini’s tutorial on Youtube. After this I finally have my textures to create my cards for the engine.
Eyelashes
With all my cards prepared, I’ve started the process of inserting one by one in my model. It’s a hard work, but I prefer this way because of the final result. Always using references, I started with the eyelashes, then I work on the eyebrows and finish the process with the hair.
Eyebrows
To create a realistic flow for the eyebrows, I’ve done some research and put the head inside Substance Painter to create some guidelines. After that, I exported a Diffuse map to use inside Maya. It was really helpful for me not to commit a lot of mistakes in this specific process.
On Pinterest you can find all the references for these guidelines!
And here’s the final result...
