Tutorials:New Hair Textures

Creating New Hair Textures

This tutorial explains the basic techniques to create new, unique hair textures that both look realistic and don't require much (if any) hand-painting. This can be done with a mouse, so you don't have to have a graphics tablet to do it. Certain parts are easier if you have a tablet, but it's not required.

This tutorial is mainly geared toward creating hairs for The Sims 3, but the same basic techniques work just fine for Sims 2 hairs as well.

What You Will Need

• Adobe Photoshop. This might be doable in other programs but you absolutely need the "Warp" transform type which is a feature of Photoshop CS and higher. If your program does not have an equivalent transform type, this will not work, or at least, will not work nearly as well.

• The UV Map of the hair you are retexturing. You can get this from UV Mapper or Milkshape. I'm not explaining here how to get that - this is textures only.

Skill Level/Difficulty

Medium/High: This tutorial assumes you are comfortable in Photoshop and have used it extensively before. While I will tell you what functions to use and how, I will not be walking you through every little basic step.

The Tutorial

Okay, let's begin... Remember, all pictures below can be clicked for larger versions - they're just shown smaller here for ease of reading.

Create a Base Texture

The first thing to do is to create a nice basic "hair" texture that we can use bits and pieces of. This is actually remarkably easy in Photoshop - almost too easy.

Create a new document. This needs to be quite large so you have lots of different areas to work with. 2000x2000 is a good size.

Set your foreground and background colours to the default - black foreground, white background (or press D on your keyboard).

Filter > Render > Clouds. Your document will fill with black and white clouds.

Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Set it to Uniform, and tick Monochromatic. Set the Amount fairly high - you want it nice and crunchy, but not so high that it obliterates the lights and darks added by the clouds. Try something around 65%.

Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Set the angle to 90 degrees, and the distance you want to set fairly high. The idea here is to turn the dots of the noise into streaks like hair. You don't want it too streaky though, or it'll go blurry. If you're using the recommended document size of 2000x2000, try setting your Distance to 120 pixels.

Repeat Add Noise + Motion Blur. Same settings as before - just add noise and then blur again. You should be seeing something that's starting to look a bit like hair. But currently, it's a bit flat and dull.

Image > Adjustments > Levels. Drag the black arrow of the input level to where the black shape in the Input Level box starts on the left. Drag the white arrow to where it starts on the right. Then adjust the midtone arrow - you'll have to do this by eye, but you want the overall image to be fairly light grey, not too dark anywhere, without the shadows or highlights losing detail. You can tweak the positioning of each of the arrows. You can also adjust the Output Levels too. Again, this is partially by eye, but if you use the settings shown in the picture, you'll probably get a pretty good result.

Input Levels:
Black: 52
Midtones: 1.81
Highlights: 208

Output Levels:
Black: 24
White: 255

Save. Save a copy of the resulting image somewhere you can easily find it. Call it something like HairTextures.bmp - saving as a PNG or BMP file type will not result in any quality loss.

Now you have a nice base texture that you can use again and again. If you like, you can experiment with this technique to create different effects. Here are some ideas of things you can try to change it up a bit:

• Before rendering clouds, set your foreground and background colour to light and dark grey instead of black and white. Black and white gives you a nice range of shadow, highlight, and midtone. Set to shades of grey (light and dark) for less range, and a straighter, less wavy hair texture.

• Get a big fuzzy brush and paint blobs of light and dark instead of rendering clouds. This gives you more control over where the shadows and highlights will be on your texture.

• After doing Filter > Render > Clouds, do Filter > Render > Difference Clouds, four times (do it once, and then CTRL-F 3x to run it three more times). This will create much smaller blobs of light and dark, which will create a much wavier looking texture.

Create Hair Piece

Obviously, you can't just slap your whole texture on your hair mesh. You have to break it up into little pieces and add nice strands to it. Doing that is actually pretty easy...

Copy and Make a New Document. Use the Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) to select a tall, narrow box around a block of hair. Make sure not to go too high or too low - you'll see where the texture's a little wonky on the top and bottom edge from the motion blur. Generally, you'll want the top of your box to be in a dark area of hair, since there's usually some darkness or shadowing to where a person's roots are. Copy your selection (CTRL-C) and then make a new document (CTRL-N) the size of your copied piece. Paste your selection (CTRL-V) into the new document as a new layer. Call this layer "Hair Piece 01".

Blob on Black. Create a new layer on top of your first one. Call this layer "Black Streaks 01". Use a fairly small, hard brush (about 30 pixels, opacity 100%, hardness 100%) and cover the bottom of your image with solid black. Then, make the brush a bit smaller (about 10 pixels) and add some black streaks going upward from the main black blob at the bottom. Make sure the black at the bottom is fully solid - no little isolated bits and pieces. This doesn't have to be perfect - in fact, having jagged, irregular edges will make it look more natural.

Select. Select the Rectangular Marquee Tool. Set its Feather value to 10 px. Select most of your image except for a little bit of the black at the bottom.

Add Noise. Make sure you still have your top (Black Streaks 01) layer selected. Filter > Noise > Add Noise. As before, this should be set to Uniform, Monochromatic, and at a fairly high Amount - as before, 65% is a good number. Because of the feathered selection, the noise will taper off a bit down toward the bottom.

Motion Blur. Deselect (CTRL-D) so your changes will affect the whole image. Again, with the "Black Streaks 01" layer still selected, Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Use the same settings as before - Angle at 90 degrees, Distance at 120 pixels. This will turn the black part at the bottom of the image into hair-like streaks. Can you see where this is going? The black part will mask off or limit the bottom edge of the hair, so it looks like nice, natural hair pieces.

Adjust Levels. If you look closely at the blurred black part, you'll see that there's dark grey, fuzzy lines due to the adding noise, below the main edge created by the blurring. We want a fairly hard edge here, not a soft one with those lines, so we need to get rid of them. To do this, again make sure your "Black Streaks 01" layer is still selected, and do Image > Adjustments > Levels.

Under Input Levels, drag both the black and grey (midtones) arrows all the way to the right, as far as they'll go. Under Output Levels, drag the white arrow all the way to the left, as far as it will go. You'll see all of the lighter grey fuzziness below the main edge disappear, leaving a fairly hard set of black streaks.

Copy Hair Piece. CTRL-Click on the thumbnail for "Black Streaks 01" in the Layers window. You'll see that it will have selected just what you have on that layer (it may not exactly follow the edges due to partial transparency). Then Select > Inverse (CTRL-SHIFT-I) to invert your selection, so everything BUT the black streaks is selected. In the Layers window, choose your "Hair Piece 01" layer. Copy it (CTRL-C).

Save. Save your document as a PSD file. Call it something descriptive like HairPieces.psd

Place Hair Piece

You've already got the piece of hair copied - now you just need to stick it in place on top of your UV map.

Open UV Map. Open up the document for your UV Map. Make sure it's 1024x1024.

Paste Hair Piece. Paste (CTRL-V) the hair piece you copied into a new layer. Call this layer "Hair Piece 01"

Roughly Place. Now, scale and rotate your piece until it's roughly in the right place and at the right angle. Don't apply the transformation yet.

Warp. Edit > Transform > Warp. Use the corner handles and the angle handles to adjust the piece of hair so it fits nicely where you want it, and has a nice, natural, hair-like shape. You can also click and drag on the hair itself to adjust its positioning. Exactly how you adjust it will depend on your particular hair, and using the warp tool can take a little getting used to, so play around with it and see what you can do with it. You can always undo your changes if you don't like the results.

Make sure your zoom level is set to 100%. If you look closely at your piece of hair, you may notice a sort of pixellated banding effect in certain areas which came up when you warped it - sort of like a racoon's tail. This doesn't seem to happen every time, or even all over on the same piece, just in certain areas. You can usually minimize it a little bit when you warp by watching the areas that seem to get a similar distortion, but even with doing so, you usually will have a little bit of it anyway. So how to fix it?

Fix Banding. Select the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Set the Feather to 10 px. Then, select one section that has banding, where all of the hair is in pretty much the same direction.

Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. This time, set the angle so it follows the angle of the hair. You may have to adjust this bit by bit so it matches as closely as possible. Set the Distance as low as you possibly can go. Start at 5 and work your way up from there until the banding effect is greatly reduced or eliminated. You probably don't want to go higher than 20 on the distance or it will get too blurry.

Repeat for the rest of the banding on the piece of hair, doing it bit by bit, only selecting chunks of hair that all go in the same direction. Make sure to readjust the Angle and Distance for each one.

When you're done, you should have a nice, smooth, realistic piece of hair with little to no visible banding, while remaining nice and sharp with no major blurring.

Repeat

To complete the rest of your texture, you just do the "Create Hair Piece" and "Place Hair Piece" sections until you've covered your UV Map with pieces of hair. You can always do thinner or shorter hair pieces and make specific shapes when you're doing the black blobs of strands to fit the kind of hair you want in certain areas. You can change the order of your hair piece layers and layer them on your hair to make interesting effects.