What you'll learn

In this Maya tutorial, we will explore the process of creating polygonal hair for our 3D characters inside of Maya. The process of creating polygonal hair is particularly useful when creating characters for use in a real-time game engine, where it's not effective to utilize a true hair dynamics system. The focus of this training is going to be on creating polygonal hair which is simple enough to be used inside of a game engine but still has the visual appearance of something that is much more complex. We will start this course by exploring some techniques for creating polygonal hair and styling the hair to have the look we want. From there, we will jump into Adobe Photoshop and create a series of color maps and transparency maps which will give our hair geometry the realism and complexity we need. Finally in the tutorial, we will learn how we can incorporate some subtle shadowing from the hair into our character's face, allowing for a more realistic end result. Software required: Maya 2011.