Adding Natural Details to the Hair

To make the hair look even more natural, take those locks of hair and, by adjusting their vertices and edges, make them overlap other locks of hair (see Figure 7.27).

Figure 7.27 Overlapping locks make the hair look a lot more natural.

Once you’ve created and overlapped locks of hair all around the head (it may take a while), you’ll probably have some empty areas. Something you can do to fill those areas is to select a whole lock of hair, duplicate it several times, and adjust its vertices to layer it over other locks of hair, placing it above or below them (see Figure 7.28). Figure 7.29 shows you how the geometry of the hair looks so far.

Figure 7.28 Duplicating locks of hair and placing them to cover empty spaces

Figure 7.29 The result so far gives you an idea of how the vertices look.

Recall from the reference images that the cap is on backwards and the hair at the front of Jim’s head that protrudes from the cap’s hole will be a little tricky to model. You can select a lock of hair, similar to the one you duplicated before, and place it on the cap’s hole. Add some loops to it, adjust it to fit the shape you want it to have, and make the lock large enough for its base to cover a good portion of the hole. After that, you can duplicate it, scale it, and rotate it to adjust it and cover some of the remaining parts of the hole, this time making the lock much smaller. Try to cover the hole completely with the big lock of hair and two or three of the smaller locks. In Figure 7.30, you can see the steps to create that aspect of the hair.

Figure 7.30 Adding the hair that will protrude from the hole in the cap

As you can see, modeling hair is not an easy task, especially since it needs a lot of adjustments in order to make it fit the head and the cap, but now it looks quite natural, so let’s move on to adding the final details!