Making Your First Model Part 6
Modeling Bangs the Old Fashioned Way

There’s a right way and a wrong way to make hair.

We’re going to use the wrong way!

Wait, What?!

Well, let me rephrase. In Blender, there are three main ways to make hair in Blender. The first may hurt your jaw when it drops to the floor. However, there’s a problem with that method . . . there’s literally no way that you can use the Cycles Engine in MMD. (Paging Bandages . . . Your crazy experiments are requested in aisle four . . .)

The second way is with curves. My initial response to that video is simply “Look at it!! Look how pretty it is!! I want to do that!!” After trying to follow the tutorial, my response changed to “. . . What??”

I would love to teach you that method, but the truth is that I still can’t wrap my head around curves. All of my knowledge on Blender is on a very superficial level. I still don’t know how to set up any of those boxes in the Cycles engine!

Looking at my favorite tutorials, I can easily see why. While I’m subscribed to Blender Guru’s newsletter, I usually rage-quit his tutorials almost every single time. He’s focused on the Cycles Engine and making photorealistic scenes. In his tutorial I linked to earlier, he downloaded the model instead of making it himself. I have too much interest in making models to spend time watching someone play with someone else’s model instead of making them!

So we’re going to do it the old fashioned way. This method was used by the Joan of Arc tutorial and is demonstrated in video form here.

As a quick aside, when you’re trying to find tutorials for polygon hair, you’re better off searching for The Sims as opposed to MMD. Once you ignore all of the parts concerning the process of exporting and importing the mesh from and to the game, you’re left with tutorials that cover making hair that will work with MMD!

So, we’re going to model hair now?!

Not quite yet. Before starting, I want to tell all of you guys about something extremely important!

Objects are a little hard to wrap your head around at first. When you start out, you think that everything needs to be connected. Not so! It’s actually easier on you as a modeler if you create separate parts as separate objects. The MMD Export feature of MMD_Tools will consolidate all of the objects in the end, so the number of objects isn’t too big of a deal.

For my head tutorial, I created each head as its own object. That way, I could move them into other layers independent of the body.

To create a new object, go into “Object Mode” and click any of the primitive meshes.

Select the mesh you just added to the scene and enter “Edit Mode.”

Why is this important and a good idea? Simple! You can do whatever you want to that object and it won’t affect the parts of the model you already created.

(As a note, there are modifiers where you can use one object to deform or move another object. For now, that’s outside of our scope.)

(As another note, I edited the face from the last tutorial a bit to just look better in general!)

Now we’re going to model hair?!

Yes! Let’s start with the bangs.

Because her bangs are asymmetric, we can’t use the mirror modifier here.

I’m starting with a plane. Here’s a quick tip for when you need to add a flat object – “R + X + 90”. Press them in that order, one at a time. This will tell Blender to first rotate the mesh, then to do it only on the X axis, and then to do it by 90 degrees.

Let’s start by moving the vertices to very, very vaguely resemble the shape of her bangs.

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way. It is completely possible to trace the edges of her bangs with extruded vertices. However, you can’t use loop cuts on those and have to use the knife tool. I’m not the biggest fan of the knife tool . . . but if you are, here’s what you should know.

• Pressing the “k” key activates knife mode.
• It’s okay to call it the “k for cut” mode in your head.
• Using it may make it impossible to use the loop cut tool.
• Use the left click to set where you want the cuts to be made.
• Right clicking will abort the knife tool without making any changes.
• Press “Enter” to commit the cuts.
• Each box you make will be a vertex along the edge the knife tool creates.

Alright! Now that that is out of the way, let’s add some loop cuts.

If you’ve forgotten how to do loop cuts, press “Ctrl + R” and hover over the faces you want to cut. Roll your mouse wheel to change the number of cuts while the lines are purple. Once you’re happy with the amount of cuts, click the left mouse button. Then the lines will be yellow and you can shift them around. Left click again to commit.

As you can see, I went a little crazy with loop cuts. There’s a reason for it! You’ll see in a bit.

Now that we have more vertices to work with, let’s get started moving them around.

Much better!

Let me point out that it would have been nearly impossible for me to do what I just did without the proportional editing tool. To turn it on and off, either go down to the toolbar and change it there . .

Or simply press the “O” key on your keyboard.

Now, we want the bangs to be fluffy!

In Blender, there is a mode called “Sculpt Mode.” There are people who make entire models in that mode as if they were a modern day Michelangelo.

Before you get started, make sure to do plenty of loop cuts to give us plenty of vertices to work with.

When doing something artistic like working in sculpt mode, you just have to look at the tools and ask yourself what you want. Do you want to add definition? Do you want to smooth things over?

The “Inflate Tool” will puff things up, the “Smooth Tool” will smooth things over . .  . But I’ve gotten the best results so far with the “Sculpt” tool.

If you prefer a more smooth look, then using the sculpt mode might not be the best idea for you. However, I like how my doodling around in sculpt mode turned out.

Before Using Sculpt Mode

-

After Using Sculpt Mode

A fun tool that is very useful for hair is the “press V” tool. I haven’t actually found out its name, but you activate it by selecting edges that are connected to other edges. When you press V, those edges separate so that you can add things like the one flyaway strand in Camila’s bangs.

Now, we need to do pretty much the same thing to the other side of her fringe.

We know that the opposite side of her fringe is layered beneath her main bangs. So I selected two faces at the edge of her main bangs and pressed “Shift + D”. This duplicated those two faces so that I could place them beneath the main bangs so that I could extrude the edges of those bangs and create that section.

To make it easier to work on the bottom fringe, I hid the main bangs by selecting one edge, then pressed “L” to select the “linked” selection. I then pressed “H” to hide. Once you want it back, press “Alt + H” to get it back.

Because the lower bangs are less important, let’s use a different method.

I swore I found it in a tutorial, but I couldn’t find any mentions of it in the tutorials I thought it was from!

First, make loop cuts that are parallel to the edge of the hair. For these bangs that are swept to the side, that means going almost horizontal.

Once you make those loop cuts, move the edges front and back to give it depth.

Going overboard will give you weirdly pointy hair, but not doing enough will give you flat hair.

Check your front and side view, and then press “Alt + H” if you hid the main bangs.

Adjust any little things that are bugging you and . . . Bam! You have bangs!

If it bothers you how paper thing your bangs are, you can add the Solidify modifier to give them depth.

Now Camila has bangs!

Tune in next time when we give her more hair!