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4/27/2025, 3:28:14 PM
Made some nice progress over the Hackation.
Beginning to grasp how to manipulate curves procedurally. Still not *fully* grasping it. But I can sort of lay curves along a surface, and make them spiral around a normal. And raise and lower the tips. So I shaped them into this short hair cut, with a bit of waviness to the strips.
After converting the curves into mesh strips, I then figured out how to apply a cylinder SDF to those strips, and set up the bump properly. Doing a bunch of math to make sure the cylinder remains proportional to the dimensions of each strip. Even when the strips are at random sizes.
Then the cylinder is repeated to fill out the strips, again, keeping perfect proportion. I'm very proud of this. It took a great deal of effort.
Then I figured out how to use the white noise node to create different values per strand inside of each strip. Using that to create variation in cylinder length, color, and bump intensity.
The length variation really helped to make the hair look less like uniform stripes, and more like actual hairs.
Then I use the white noise node trick again to mask larger chunks. Multiplying them with the individual strands, thus creating sort of "clumps" of hair. So it's not all randomly sized. It's a clumped random.
There's still more work to do. I want to figure out how to make the cylinders curl and wave, while maintaining proportion inside of the mesh strips. That's going to be the next big hurdle.
Also, right now, the hair consists of 96,000 triangles, because I've spread 2000 curves evenly across he skull. I will be able to reduce the number of curves by more strategically laying the hair to cover more surface area. I just haven't gotten around to doing that yet.
Beginning to grasp how to manipulate curves procedurally. Still not *fully* grasping it. But I can sort of lay curves along a surface, and make them spiral around a normal. And raise and lower the tips. So I shaped them into this short hair cut, with a bit of waviness to the strips.
After converting the curves into mesh strips, I then figured out how to apply a cylinder SDF to those strips, and set up the bump properly. Doing a bunch of math to make sure the cylinder remains proportional to the dimensions of each strip. Even when the strips are at random sizes.
Then the cylinder is repeated to fill out the strips, again, keeping perfect proportion. I'm very proud of this. It took a great deal of effort.
Then I figured out how to use the white noise node to create different values per strand inside of each strip. Using that to create variation in cylinder length, color, and bump intensity.
The length variation really helped to make the hair look less like uniform stripes, and more like actual hairs.
Then I use the white noise node trick again to mask larger chunks. Multiplying them with the individual strands, thus creating sort of "clumps" of hair. So it's not all randomly sized. It's a clumped random.
There's still more work to do. I want to figure out how to make the cylinders curl and wave, while maintaining proportion inside of the mesh strips. That's going to be the next big hurdle.
Also, right now, the hair consists of 96,000 triangles, because I've spread 2000 curves evenly across he skull. I will be able to reduce the number of curves by more strategically laying the hair to cover more surface area. I just haven't gotten around to doing that yet.
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