Making of Ella

“Making of Ella” by Ziv Qual
When I Started working on the hairs I’ve approached it as I always do. The first step was to clone the polygons that will grow hairs from the head to a new unrenderable mesh. I then added hairs and started combing and testing many different possibilities. A few pointers when working with max’s hair:

variation – this is the key to make your hair look interesting. Always try to test out how much you can push parameters that will create variations in your hair such as: rand scale, hue / value variation, frizz tip, randomize etc’.
Passes – it is often recommended to test how your hair looks when more than one pass is used. The higher the parameter, the softer the hair will render.
Multi strand parameters – Hair often tends to clamp up and this feature simulates it nicely. I usually turn it on with root slay having a larger parameter than tip slay.
Lights and shadows of your scene will make all the difference about how your hair’s gonna render. usually using spotlights with shadow maps are ideal for hairs. An important decision that always needs to be made when working with hairs is if you want to render the hairs at buffer or MR prim mode. buffer usually renders faster and looks softer but MR prim works well with many different light and shadow types.
At a certain point I was struck with frustration when I realized that this method is good but it doesn’t allow me full freedom and control to design the hair specifically as I want. That’s when I came to realize I can work with many smaller groups of hairs instead and control them by splines. I started up by creating 1 spline which acts like the profile of the hair’s shape and cloned it twice to 3 different elements that will control the hair. I’ve added hairs and pretty much used similar parameters as before. Shaping the hair to specific shapes was easy this way. I’ve clone the hair pieces many times to smaller and larger parts and re-adjusted every piece until I was happy with how it turned out.
For extra touches, I’ve added a few more groups for random single hairs to give it a little more “natural messy” feel.

Rendering and compositing
The image was basically done with the hit of the render button but rendering many different passes allowed me some more fine tuning which was necessary mostly for high res details. I’ve rendered many different passes and used masks in photoshop to determine where and how much each pass is used.

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