Original subtitles

recently

I figured out how to achieve the arcane style hair

in blender for tea

utilize a hair system in Maya called Yeti

but instead of using Blender's hair system

we're gonna work with curves

disclaimer I'm breaking out but more importantly

this is not a tutorial on how to create

this hair shader from scratch

I've already done that live

so if you're interested in the minute details

then I suggest you check that out

instead I'm gonna give you this project file for free

and I'm gonna walk you through the entire note tree

and explain what they do

and on top of that I'm gonna give you this material

in the form of an add on

again for free

so you can

easily install it like you would with any other

add on and import it in with the add menu

in the shader editor

I've also created a paid version of this add on

that comes in the form of a shader note

group that has all the settings nicely grouped

now before we talk about the notes

let's first figure out how to set up the hair

create a clump of hair we need two curves 1

a curve determine the path and 2

a curve determine the profile

for the path

you could use a path curve or the Bezier curve

I prefer to use the path curve but both works

it is important though

that you set it up so that the left side of the path

curve is the root and the right side be the tip

for the profile

we will start with the beze circle

then move the points around

until we get the shape that we like

then select the path and under geometry bevel

select object

then pick the profile curve

in edit mode use Ctrl t

to rotate the curve

and use Alt as to change the thickness of each point

next

here's a little quick tip on how to dress up the hair

as of today I like to start with the primary details

which are the larger clumps of hair

then some secondary details

which break the silhouette of the primary

clumps of hair

they generally flow in the same

direction of the primary clumps

but it's good to throw in some that don't

and then some tertiary details

which are the strengths of hair

that breaks up the silhouette of the clumps even more

so it's pretty much the primary secondary

tertiary principle or the big medium and small

now you don't need every clump to have such a high

level of detail

in fact it's better

to keep things tasteful

and have a variety of details for the primary

clumps to still be readable

all right so this is the note tree in its entirety

all the notes on the left are your masks

that controls things like the scale

details of your strengths

the movement speed

and the position of your specular and things like that

and the notes on the right are basically your

look development

notes like the base color of your hair

your specular gradient of colors

transparent tips etc

so let's just start with the specular profile

for this I'm gonna have to rotate the hair this way

and all I'm gonna do is to just

move the color

ramp stops and you can kind of see how they correlate

with the hair

it starts from your roots and it ends on the tips

all I gotta do is just move this around for you to

understand what's going on

right far to do this

you can see that now the middle is black

and the sides are white

let's just say you want to add another

strip of a specular

somewhere around the roots

let's just add a stop over here

and then two more on this side

there you go

just like that you have another strip specular

so yeah just be as creative as you want

and then let's move on to the specular strip messiness

so all you got to move here is this

vector slider over here

the higher the value of the vector is

the more disrupted the

uniformity of the specular strip is

if you bring it all the way down to

0 you can see how the

specular strip is completely uniform

and what is driving this to happen is

this frame these frames over here

so let's first take a look at the specular noise

but the two functions I would tweak are the scale and

detail and I like to use the scale to adjust the

primary shape of the specular

and then the detail to break it up in a finer strand

so you just mess around with this

til your heart's content I'm gonna leave it at 4 and 4

and then now let's take a look at the break uniform

and for this what I'm gonna do is to set the factor

all the way down to zero

you can see that these strands are converging from

the roots to the tips in a very uniform manner

so there's completely no intersections at all

it is just like a

hair shampoo commercial with those you know

really fine hair

so all this dust is to kind of disrupt

the uniformity of the strengths

so if I were to slowly introduce this

factor you can kind of see how now they

no longer converge to the tip in a uniform manner

if you were to exaggerate this you can see what it's

actually doing

so obviously you don't want to

leave it at too high of a value

but I'm gonna leave it up to you to decide

I'm gonna leave it at 0 point

02 for now

now the next thing I want to take a look at is the

strength position offset frame

this is a frame where you don't have to touch anything

at all but to just explain what it does

I'm gonna have to first remove this

and then I'm gonna isolate this

and duplicate this a bunch of times

now you can see with these

five clumps of hair

how the pattern of the strands are exactly the same

and this applies to every

object every single clump of hair

so that's not ideal

and all I'm telling Glenda to do is to say hey

I want for each object to offset the position of the

y location

and how I'm doing that is if you take a look at this

random socket here

each and every one of these clumps of hair

have different luminance values

so you can see over here this

clump of hair is completely black and then

pretty sure one of these like brighter ones

they're completely white

black has a value of

0 and white has a value of 1 a pure white obviously

so all I'm doing is to

take this random socket to drive it into the Y

however

it still looks copy pasted so clearly an offset of

0 to 1 isn't enough

so all this map range is doing is to tell blender

hey instead of offsetting it from

0 to 1

I want you to offset the strands from negative 100

to 100 so you can see

as I snap the map range in between the random

and combine XYZ

you can see how

the duplicated pattern no longer

exists because the offset is much more extreme

next let's take a look at

these three frames over here

all you gotta move here really

are these two frames over here

this you can ignore so let's first take a look at the

speed node just observe the speed of the specular

now right now it's at 0.6 or 60 percent

if I were to put this to 1

or 100 percent you can see that it moves a lot quicker

now let's put it at 200 percent

you can see that the specular is

moving out of the hair really really quickly

if I were to set this to 0.2 or

20 percent you can see how it barely moves

now I'm gonna set this back to

60 percent and then for position

all you're gonna have to move is the factor and a

now you can see that I've labeled it over here

factor equals random position and a is position

by moving the

a slider

you can see that I'm offsetting the position of the

specular strips

so let's just say you have your character

posed like this

now the anasotropic specular is no longer in frame

but you still want to maintain that look

you could just offset the specular

up like this to kind of just cheat a little

and there you go

and then random position as it says

you can randomize the position

of the specular strips

if the offset isn't enough for you you could

open up the map range

and then accelerate these two values over here

so put this at negative 5 and then put this at 5

there you go now it's like super offset it

but obviously that's you don't need all of that action

it's unnecessary

now let's take a look at the look development

side of things

so I'm gonna start with color one

so this is where you would set

the base color of your hair

let's just say I want it to be blonde now

so let's just quickly move this around

and just like that

you've got yourself some

blonde clumps of hair

so previously in the live tutorial

I've had it set up in a way

where you would have to set both the base color

and the specular color

and that could be a little bit

well it's just double work

but let's just say you still want to have

control over the color of the specular

all you got to do is just you know move the hue

saturation and value

of this node and you can see what it does

so let's just say you want to have like an iridescent

type hair you could do that

sure why not now what is color 2

well it says color 2 gradient

so as it says it's supposed to introduce a gradient

of colors but you obviously don't see the brown

so let's go up here to

the random distribution

so all you have to move here in this frame is this

threshold over here from 0 to 1

so as I increase this slider to 1

you can see that it slowly introduces the new gradient

color which is brown

obviously this was inspired by Asia

so here's how it works

we all know now that these clumps of hair

have your own unique values ranging from 0 to 1

all this note is doing is to say hey

only Lat pass values that are less than this threshold

and that's it

so all you got to do here is to just turn this from

0 to 1 next let's take a look at the gradient mask

okay obviously for this to happen

I'm gonna have to turn that on to 1

and yeah that's it

it's pretty self explanatory

it's just a gradient mask

and all this factor is doing is to make this

gradient go from completely uniform to strandy

that way it better blends in with the strands but then

also kind of looks cool without

any disruption

again your call I'll leave it up to you

and with that said

I think there's no need for

any further explanation as to what color

2 does

cool now let's take a look at the object variation

so all you got to move here are two things

the factor of this node and the factor of this node

so just the factors of this frame

so you can see factor equals hue

so if I were to increase the

factor of this node

you can see how it starts

introducing a variation of hues

and for this variation

of luminance value so

yeah this is great for creating

variety and breaking the

uniformity of colors

if you want to introduce a slight

hue variation and then some value variations

it's just two sliders

that's it

next let's take a look at the strands variation

so instead of offsetting the

clumps of hair we're gonna

offset the strands

the values of strands

the saturation of strands and the hue of strands

you can play around with the contrast of the mask

if you want like a more contrasty look

bring the stops closer together

you want a more feathered look

than just spread them apart

next let's take a look at roughness

so this is another discrepancy from the live tutorial

so in a live tutorial I had this map

plugged into the metallic

which created a variation

of metallic strands and non metallic strands

this time I've decided to

plug it into the roughness instead

so if

you want your hair to be shinier just turn down the

2 min but you can

still see how some strands of hair are rough

if you want everything to be completely

wet just turn this down too

and if you want the mask to be more

contrasty just play with these two values

in case anyone is confused as to how to work

the map range

let me give you a visual demonstration

so the map range is exactly the same as the color ramp

just in a format of numbers

so this you're basically just doing this right

0.35 0.35 and when you do this you're just doing this

so 0.7 let's set this to 0.7

there you go by moving this

you're doing this

so 0.6 let's set this to 0.6 and then by moving this

you're moving

this

so 0.75

0.75 that's it exactly the same one is just less visual

next let's take a look at the strand height

you don't want to adjust the strength at all

all you want to move is the distance

strength is like an opacity slider

whereas the distance slider

actually accounts for the height

you want to leave this at a fairly low value

unless your hair is like giant

let's just say you don't model your

characters according to scale

let's just scale this up

let's make it like huge massive titan hair

you can see now that you don't see any

bump map at all

so you're gonna have to bump this up a little bit more

there you go if I were to make it even more giant

can see how it starts going away again

and then you're gonna have to

bump this up again

there we go okay

now let's take a look at the transparent tips

now this is probably my favorite part of the shader

so all you're gonna move in this frame are two things

the stops the color ramp and the factor

so let's first talk about the color ramp

so just like the gradient colors

we're also utilizing a gradient map over here

and if we were to see this in action

and I were to bring the stops close together

you can see how

the gradient mask is completely uniform

and all the factor is doing is to make it

look more like strands

and if you want a more feathered look

you want to bring the color amp stops further apart

and there you go a feathered

more feathered look

now the specular tint you don't really have to

move anything

all it's doing is the tint the

specular to match the color of your hair

so whatever color you set for the base color to be

it's going to adapt to it

but let's just say you don't want your

specular to be tinted you could just remove this

before the tint and after the tint

and you can play around with the values here

I've had it set

default to 30

if it's too much for you you could lower that down too

or let's just say you want it to be white

but you don't want to unplug this

you could just turn

down this saturation all the way to

0 there you go and then lastly

we have the sheen tint

so right now there isn't any sheen going on

which is more to the likes of arcane

but if we were to expand this

panel and then turn up the weight

can see how there's a sheen wrapped around

each clump of hair right

me personally I like this look a lot

but if you're trying to stay true to arcane

then you probably want to turn this down to zero

and then the roughness slider is basically

how far out the Sheen is wrapping around the hair

just see it that way and that's it

so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial walkthrough

again

the project file and add on will be available on my

gumroad

the free and paid version so consider subscribing

and yeah go let out the pee you've been holding in

bye guys