Looking at the pictures, you've got to be thinking, "That is some wild hair you've got going." And you'd be right. I'm trying something new with it. I searched YouTube for some tutorials, and I found an odd one. This guy used Maya's PaintEffects to get hair laid out on the skull, converted to polygons, then exported to ZBrush. I did one better and laid out my PaintEffect strokes and kept the strokes in big locks, then exported each one separately so I could style the hair in ZBrush.
Did it work? .... I'm not sure yet. Yeah it looks kinda cool, but for the game res version of my character I can't have the 1.3million triangles I've got now. So I need to make a hair shape and hope that the strand detail from the PaintEffects transfers into the normal map. The other reason I'm not too crazy about it is that the locks are kind of difficult to style. The ends of the clumps tend to round out and lose the strand effect. So some parts of the hair look like a rat's nest. But I think I can fix it in the normal map with Photoshop, and I can cover what I don't fix with hair cards and alpha.
The other thing I'm posting is an updated welder man. Rockstar came to visit our Demo Reel Intentions Day in school, and I got some really good advice from Josh Bass, the Art Director for Rockstar San Diego on their latest project, Red Dead Redemption. He noted that my character's left thigh was twisting the polygons really bad, and that I can fix it by adding a twist joint mid thigh (similar to the forearm twist joint). Since my character was already weighted and it would have taken hours to add a bone and reweight him, and since my character was only in on pose and not going to be animated, I simply smoothed out the weighting issue and manually moved some verts so they didn't twist so bad. But the idea of the twist joint in the thighs is gold, and I'll use it in models to come for sure. Josh also said my characters eyes were way too bright, so I have since toned them down. They fit much better now and don't look so out of place .
