HairCurves Modifier
See video, but please read -- I offer MUCH MORE than what you see:
Cartoon hair curves have always been notoriously-difficult in Blender.
VRoid Studio offers an easier process for making cartoon hair by simply drawing a brush stroke across an invisible curved mesh surface (a curved surface that is easily-tweakable via control points). The surface is somewhat torus-like by default, but can be heavily modified. It uses a series of curves like ribs to model the surface. The surface itself (that the hair strip follows) can be tweaked and deformed via control points that appear on the selected hair curve. The hairs generally follow the mesh surface for the most part, but they can also modify the surface if you tweak the control points on them. Using sliders, you can make the individual hairs thicker/thinner/wider/flatter/longer/shorter. An implementation in Blender would offer the additional ability to change the texture used for individual hairs as well as the horizontal and lengthwise shape, taper, and ends of the individual hairs or paths. It would even allow you to create ropes/cords/wires using repeated assets along the path for hair like braids or rastas.
I die a little inside when I imagine this feature not being in Blender.
This should be a standard feature for adding consecutive curves for hair. Rarely does one just add a single curve at a time, and usually a painterly approach is impossible for this style of hair without a lot of heavy sculpting. You could get a better topology for the hair (and auto-texture/material the hair) using a method like this, creating game-ready assets without much sweat. The modifier would allow you to either use your mouse or tablet to draw or click to add/remove control points for the curve. A control point could be marked as "inactive" too. The advantage of making a control point "inactive" would allow you to separate or "dot" curves (or repeated assets) across the surface mesh, making interesting hairstyles that follow a single curve possible. In general, curves are grouped (like cartoon hair chunks, or chunks of wires/rastas/braids into ponytails) and should follow a mesh that can be easily tweaked as a whole. For complex setups (like braids), I suggest weighting hair to a single 3d curve, (whose surface is actually a procedural cylinder rather than a torus). This allows for super-creative hairstyles WAY beyond what VRoid Studio offers -- and Blender can even skin these automatically for instant animation-ready hair. :) -- Custom mesh shapes should be possible too. This would allow you to draw anime eyelids if you use a character mesh or head to draw cartoon designs on (you'd just flatten the hair entirely to a single strip of polys at this point).
Sculpting and setting up this kind of thing can be a nightmare. -- Please save us, Blender!
6 Comments
IMO there will be cool to have the same tools for curves as for hair grooming. I mean sculpt mostly
Sounds like an excellent idea for add-on. Maybe Grease Pencil 2 Hair Curve.
gumroad.com/l/hairtool
* @testure * youtu.be/8da1I-TR75o
See that time step in the video. The tedious sequence of creating the underlying mesh yourself each time is why I suggest a modifier that generates curve objects. With Hair Tool 2, the mesh underlay must be created by hand every time you need a few curves, but beyond that, it is not instantly tweakable without a vast number of steps more. Most times, you generally want a half-sphere, a 3d spline, or a cylinder you can quickly tweak (i.e. with control points) so that the general profile and volumes are the correct shape. Hair Tool 2 doesn't care about this principle -- it only cares about the tweaking of the strands themselves, and it is aiming for screenshots/rendering -- not game asset development, which requires speed above all else.
I've used VRoid before, it's more annoying to use than anything.
* @Vampiric Kai * I can agree overall, but that mainly has to do with the infinite number of hair layers you've got to fumble through to tweak a single hair. A "one and done" situation with a quick modifier for hair strand volumes (like VRoid lets you do) to generate a fast layer of hair at once would be a great start to a base hair mesh, then some standard modeling or curves for the less "fine-tuned" hair aspects/curves.
The advantage of a modifier is that, in the end, it could all be procedurally boolean(ed) and you'd get a single clump of possibly remeshed hair to work with (rather than a huge set of individual hairs and their respective layers).