So, I decided to challenge myself a bit by doing a detailed hair mesh patterned after none other than Shirley Temple, but while I've done a completely custom hair mesh before, I'm a bit puzzled at how to pull off a proper bunch of ringlets. I tried the helix primitive, but while I did end up with a ringlet or two I was wondering as to what's the best way to deal with such complex geometry.

In other words, how do Cazy, Anubis and the other guys end up doing such curly do's?

What program are you using for your modelling? Doing complex geometry in Milkshape is doable, but a giant pain in the ass.

Have you tried looking at curls on hairs that you like the look of, and examining their geometry and mapping?

3DS Max, as what the title says. I might as well take a peek, then,

Oh, derp, sorry.

In that case, I can actually help! I know Max pretty well. I think I would start with a long strip of polys in a plane, map it, and then slowly form it into a cylinder - drag each edge into a circle, and down, sort of like the coiled cord on an old-style corded phone. You'd need to have a fairly good idea of how long you want to make it, and how complex (i.e. how many turns around it would take, and how many polys per turn) as you'd want it to be the size you need before you begin deforming it, or you'd have to mess with the mapping to add more length, which would be a bit of a pain. Of course, that would just be for big thick ringlet curls and wouldn't work well all over, or for a naturally curly style. For natural curls I prefer just using a lumpy plane curled in on the edges, and texturing on the curls.

Thanks for the tips, although a visual guide on curling planes up in a loop would do. As what I said earlier I tried rigging planes to a spline, and spawn curled up planes using vortices, but it was cumbersome.

I know there are hairstyles similar to Shirley's that are available for TS3, but most of them look ersatz to me and none are as "puffy" as what Temple had IRL.

Very very quick and dirty visual of what I meant:

Make your long plane with however many divisions you think it'll need. This one is 15, which wouldn't make for a very long curl, but... like I said, quick and dirty. Map it first before you start messing with it. Editable poly, and select all the verts but the end.



Drag those vertices out a bit to the side (see the top view), and down a bit (see the front/left view):



Deselect the next set of vertices, and repeat - out a bit to the side, down a bit:



And just keep repeating - deselect the last bits moved, move out and down, until you have a little coil.



You can see on the top view that I sort of messily stacked the vertices vertically so this is pretty much a stretched 5-sided cylinder, but you don't have to stack them if you don't want - just makes it easier to move the whole thing at once if you want to... Moving each set of vertices less far downward would result in tighter, more Shirley Temple-like curls (I just did this in like 5 minutes as a demo so wasn't, um, trying to do it too carefully).

ETA: It might also be possible to just use cylinders, mapped sort of like the label on a soup can, and then very carefully textured with diagonal lines of hair that match seamlessly. It would be much fewer polys, but I dunno how good you are at textures/seams. I think this hair uses that method... Can grab yourself a copy of SimPE and look at the mesh and texture (don't need TS2 to do that).

Noted, but what about stitching them to a scalp?

The under layers, you can just messily shove the end into the head a bit as it's not going to show. The top layers you'd keep a few sections straight at the top end (so start doing what I demo'd, but skip the first 5 or so sections of vertices so you have those to work with), and just make them follow the contour of the crown of the head but raised a bit, and then stick the top two vertices against the scalp, parallel to the hair's part, if that makes sense. If not, I can try to demo that for you too, but I need to go buy a new rug and take the kids to the playground so it'll have to be in a little while.

Well I'm not in a rush anyway, so it's ok if you demo it later. I'm just curious as to how it's done, and yeah doing it in Milkshape can be a PITA especially for someone like myself who's more used to meshing with Max.

Super basic and not terribly pretty demo of how it should basically look:



The curls themselves are FAR too narrow vertically - there should be only a tiny bit of space between each turn of the corkscrew, rather than a big gap like I have (was too lazy to fix it just for a demo), but... all the part leading up the scalp is, is some more strips of polys, just sort of stuffed into place and then the vertices on the very end are in contact with the scalp. The vertices of the two curls where they contact each other in the middle are snapped together, until they split on the fifth row down (you can see this in the bottom view), so if textured so the hair comes all the way out to the sides of each piece, it'll look like a nice solid piece of hair flowing out of the scalp until it splits off into the neatly formed curls.

This way would end up -quite- high poly though - would be worth looking at how the other hair I linked is done, and seeing if it can be adapted for the style you want. It's less easy to control each individual curl that way, but maybe you can use a combination of the two - cylinder curls for the under layers, spirals for the top?

Yeah, I did notice that she used the cylinder method with her hair - it seems like a good workaround but it seems crude imo.

Well, you don't have to keep all the cylinders the same, or even completely smooth. You can make them flare a little on the ends, or add a lump or bump to them here and there, make some longer or shorter, mirror them, etc., and maybe have three or four different types so you can vary the textures a little bit (mapped all the same, just with slightly different textures) so they will look different. You'd want to do that with the spirals, too, you just have somewhat less control over exactly the way the hair falls.

Of course some variation is needed lol, as things would look bland.

I'm trying out your technique as of now, although it'll take some time before I perfect it or something.

Sorry for the double post, but still no dice, I still find it a little too difficult.

EDIT: Managed to do this, but I wonder if there's a less half-baked way to pull off a bunch of curls: