jhair 11 - WIP1 (Patreon)

- or is it 12 ... I guess it doesn't matter at the moment, we'll go with "codename" 11 for now and name it at the end :P

- right, so I started working on this poll hair last week I think. After spending some time gathering images and figuring out what the style will look like, I did a basic blockout model to use as a reference and guide. Decided to just go with a lower fishtail braid rather than one that would go up into the crown region. While it's not as glamorous, it's easier to model and also makes the style a bit more "everyday" casual which what I wanted for this model. In the front, I went with some loose short bangs. I initially deliberated on just having the whole hair being pulled back kinda like an Frozen Elsa style, but I think I like bangs more. Personal taste, but I guess I don't really like ponytails/buns that pull the whole hair back, it makes the whole thing look kinda boring/uninteresting in the front.

- next was haircards/textures and this is where I hit a snag. Or crashed and burned is probably more accurate. Unfortunately, for some reason that I still don't know, I had some sort of file saving bug that caused me to lose about 8hrs worth of work. Needless to say, hair was pulled and lost, facepalms were issued and my raging screams were probably heard by all of my neighbours. Long story short, I had to redo a lot of the work on the textures. Final ones or at least what I'll be using to model the hair, are now done and are laid out in img#2.

- as a little side note on the textures, some older patrons might remember that I had some issues with normal maps looking "off" on the last 2 hairs that I made and I literally even disabled the normal map ingame for jhair10, so it was technically missing one. I think I finally cracked the issue I was having this time and after this hairstyle is done, I will very likely go back and rebake normals for jhair8/10 as those were affected.

- at the time of writing this post, I've also started modeling the actual hairstyle. These images are about 2-3 days old. The base braid has been modelled and a lot of the base layer hair cards have been laid down, but more on that in the next post.