Overview

Creating realistic hair textures can be extremely challenging. There are a lot of different techniques you use. Which one(s) you choose depends on your project, your expected outcome, and your level of skill.

Most of these tutorials explain how to hand-paint new hair textures. Photoskinning is NOT suitable for hair as it looks pixellated and bad. Handpainting hair textures can be extremely time consuming and difficult, but it is worth it for the beautiful results.

For completely new hairstyles, you would have to create a new mesh - making original hair meshes is one of the hardest Sims 2 modding projects there is, and is not a task for beginners (or those currently just making recolours).

What you will need

• Body Shop
• A graphics editing program
• A graphics tablet, if you would like to do handpainting.

Tutorials

• Hair Recoloring Tutorial - Teaches how to recolour and manipulate Maxis texture to make new hair textures. This is the easiest technique, and this tutorial is written specifically for The Sims 2.

• Painting Realistic Hair - Not Sims 2 specific, but still quite useful if you want to handpaint hair.

• Painting Hair in Photoshop - Similar to the above (also not specifically for TS2) but goes into a bit more depth. Creates beautiful, realistic handpainted hair textures.

• Texturing Hair - Again, not for TS2, but does show using a 3D model similar to TS2. In this one you can see how the part, bangs, highlights and shadows work on the flat graphic and then wrap on the 3D mesh.

• Low Polygon Hair Texturing - Another good non-TS2 tutorial, this one specifically relating to texturing hair for low-poly hair models. It also looks like a simpler handpainting technique that someone might actually be able to do with a mouse, for straight, simple styles.

General Tips and Tricks

• There's some discussion on how to use Photoshop to create hair textures in this thread. The discussion starts at post #25 and continues on for a few posts. This little tutorial with pictures is basically showing the same thing, without the Clouds step, which adds all kinds of lovely waves.