The Road to 3D Grooming. My Story. Part 15 - 2018 - Grooming for Joseph #3. Cornrows and Beard

Continuing the story =)

Who's this guy? - you might ask. Come on, don't you recognize him? It's the same Joseph who hangs out with Camilla from the previous episodes. No, not her brother. Her boyfriend. He's just changed a bit. Okay, he's bulked up a bit =)

Harder than last time

In the same year, 2018, I kept experimenting with hairstyles. The last episode was about my first braids, and I wanted to go further. Not just a couple of braids, but a really complex hairstyle: lots of thin cornrows lying tight along the scalp, plus shaved sides.

I also really wanted to learn how to make proper beards. Last time I was just figuring out how a beard works, and this time I decided to do it right.

Why not? Joseph wanted to look more stylish =)

To be honest, it was quite a challenge. This hairstyle really wore me out. But I'm glad I didn't give up and finished it.

How the cornrows were drawn

The trickiest part was the cornrows themselves. There was no automatic way to make them back then, so I drew every single cornrow by hand with the Draw Strands tool in Ornatrix. Then I converted the strands to curves, connected them with the braid curves and brought everything back into Ornatrix.

I built the braids with the same Braid Maker plugin as in the last episode, and then turned their geometry into hair with the HairFromMeshStrips modifier.

Today this process is much faster. In Houdini, the MetaHuman for Houdini plugin has a dedicated MH Groom Cornrow node that builds the cornrow curves. Then you bring these curves into Maya and turn them into hair with Ornatrix there. This tutorial by Argentum Studio shows in detail how to work with the node:

I didn't track the time. Usually 10 days is enough for me to make a decent hairstyle, but here, because of the hand-drawn cornrows and all the fuss with the weaving, it clearly took longer.

Maya and V-Ray instead of Max and Corona

This time I did all the grooming in Ornatrix for Maya, without moving to 3ds Max. I work in both, I just wanted to experiment. Plus, I liked the viewport in Maya more. And I remember V-Ray for Maya had improved a lot back then: in my tests it worked better than in 3ds Max, especially VRayALSurface.

So the render here is V-Ray Next for Maya. And I rendered everything in V-Ray Cloud: my PC wasn't very powerful at the time, and the cloud helped me get results much faster. Lighting - an HDRI from hdrihaven.

With a face again

And did you notice? Joseph finally has a face =)

Sometimes my creative soul wants to create more than just hair. I wanted to think through a character's personality again. Also, some hairstyles are better shown with a face: a client wants to see the final result, not a faceless mannequin. So I practice both approaches.

By the way, why is he so big? And why didn't I make normal realistic people?

Well, I like cartoon characters much more. They're more interesting, and I've always been drawn to them. Realism is already all around us. Grab a camera and take a photo =) I've always been drawn to something more fairy-tale-like.

In general, every project, whether personal or for a client, is always interesting for me. I live, breathe and dream this stuff =)

Do you like cartoon characters? And would you want a hairstyle like this? Let me know in the comments =)

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Soft: Maya, Ornatrix, V-Ray, V-Ray Cloud, Braid Maker
More renders HERE

Previous episode: Part 14 - 2018 - Hair Grooming/Lookdev for Joseph #2