Hair Selection (BTS #10) (Patreon)

From my comment in the 0.25 release post:

During Zimmy’s healing scene, if you look closely, the front part of his hair does grow back slightly. I’m still in the process of finding a better looking long hair style that fits his elf ears. As for his eyebrows, he couldn’t exactly groom them living on the street. I don’t want to spoil his particular options yet. But I assure you, Ehrlynn will make sure he is dressed to impress upon returning.

I went through a ton of iterations on hair. A lot of the longer Daz G8 compatible hair is designed for portraits. Some have no ability to bend, shorten, or lengthen whatsoever. During sex scenes, this would cause clipping into the character model and look terrible. I always wondered why there were so many bald VN characters, especially a couple years ago. Now I know why. If you take a look at the Motherhood posts, there are several long hair styles on display. I made sure each one of those hair models would bend out of the way when needed. To little surprise, ponytail styles were the most common candidate that fit that criteria.

That time for deciding on Zimmy's new look is drawing closer. I've recently done a bunch of test shots of alternate hairstyles for him. Due to his ability to rapidly grow hair, I decided to split my search into finding a short style and a long style. Also note how I toggled his body hair on and off for some of these pics to give a more feminine appearance.

First try with long hair was okay, but I just wasn't into this look. I liked the bangs but not the overall shape. I can't really explain it better than "Meh".

Next try with long hair but tied into a bun. The bangs were almost the same as the previous style except the sides better framed the face. However, there were some problems with this hair when viewed from behind. This bun hair was meant for female models, not males. Since this hair was in the maybe category anyway, once it had visual problems I couldn't easily fix, I moved on.

This is the same hair asset from the haircut and washing scene. It had a ton of options and I tried some out. I immediately found the look for the short style. This was the fastest I think I ever settled on a hairstyle for a character. Now onto finding the elusive long hairstyle.

To me this style made the most sense. Long doesn't have to mean super long. Plus I liked the hastily pulled back ponytail look. This is the hair asset I chose for Zimmy's long style but not the final version of it. I'm still testing this hair out and already made adjustments to the position of the ponytail among others.

The two other changes you likely noticed were Zimmy's eyebrows and his body hair. I dropped the deep red hair color for orange for both. The eyebrows are less bushy and appear groomed. I'll post a final version of his two styles once I start shooting the scenes for Day 4.