Jhair 8 - Wip1 (Patreon)

- heyo, here's an update cause I've been pretty silent lately.

- as you might've surmised, I started working on the poll hair last week and I've been slowly but surely grinding away at it since.

- started with the textures first like the last times I did this. This time though, I've taken the extra time to experiment a little bit. These textures are made and rendered somewhat different than the previous ones. There was some growing pains, wasted time and some problem solving needed, but the end result, I think, is reaally nice. The diffuse texture particularly benefits enormously, I'd say these are a lot more life-like than before. I'm pretty happy with these overall, this might finally be the first texture set that I reuse for future hairs.

- Unfortunately, I made the roots and tips of the hairs a bit too thin, they're pretty much realistic in terms of size and for FO4's engine it's probably going to be an aliased sub pixel mess. I'm going to have to rebake those with thicker values after I'm done with the model, a thing I'm not looking forward to seeing as those textures took close to 10 hours to render on my potato pc. Oh well, that's the point of experimentation I guess :P

- I've decided to go for a high bun with some loose strands, very close in style to the brown ref in the poll. Currently building the first layer of the hair which for me is usually the main volume of the hair and the bigger gaps that I want the style to have. This time I've also decided to make a quick blockout sculpt to help judge volume and basic shape. I've never done this before, I usually just eyeball it, but that generally leads to a lot of back and forth constant adjustments. I have to say that it's been quite useful so far and it's probably going to save time in the long run.

- Kinda done with the first layer on the scalp/crown, might do some adjustments but the next big thing is to build a base for the bun that I can later detail. This will probably be an interesting challenge, I've never done something like this so I'm not entirely sure how to approach it and the bun itself is pretty complex with all the changes in direction. I'd say it's the main feature of the style though, so I'm not going to let up until I'm at least satisfied with it, a good looking bun is a must for this hair.