Jhair20 - WIP1 (Patreon)

right, I've been quiet when it comes to posting new work. As you might've guessed, I've been working on the poll hair, so here's an update on the progress. Or rather a first look at the progress since it's the first time I'm showing it. I think there's a week and a half of work in here, though I don't recall exactly when I started and I didn't get to work on this everyday unfortunately.

I've mentioned in the poll that I'd be heavily targeting the black hairstyle so I went all in on that look. Normally I'd blend or take inspiration from multiple sources and try to create something with a certain theme, but for this I'm simply trying to recreate a specific style, so it's kinda different from past work in that regard. I'm not going to repost the reference image, it's in the pinned poll if you want to compare so far, but I'm pretty close at the moment. Obviously I won't be making an exact replica, but if it's 80%-90% of the way there I'd be happy with the results.

Showcased images are a basic hair sculpt I use to check volume/flow and overall style and the current model containing 2 (somewhat completed) layers of detail. The headmesh isn't the FO4 one, so the model doesn't fit it properly, but for presentation, that one is prettier so I used a different one. Also I'll take the time here to complain about the FO4 headmesh and how awful it is to use for modelling hairs, it makes my life so much harder. It's tradition for me, I always complain about that when I make one of these WIP hair posts :). And by God, it is even worse when making shorter hair, I realized this time, since I usually don't make hair this short. Sigh

It was kinda tricky to make this since I'm lacking in photo reference. I'm pretty much just modelling from a single side image with just of couple of unrelated styles in the background that don't help much. Because of this, I'm quite happy with the side views, but somewhat unsure of the other angles, especially the back view. I don't know how this would actually look like in the back, I have NO reference to consult, so I'm just winging it. Far from ideal, but it is what it is, and for what it is, it doesn't look horrible I guess.

For textures, I'm reusing the wolfcut textures for this hairstyle, though I added some smaller texture strands to the texture sheet, that are in use in the shorter hair on the back. The ref has slightly shorter hair in the back upper neck area, but I'm scared of going too thin/small with the way FO4 handles alphas, so opted for a more opaque, longer hairs that should work better ingame.

The model itself is currently at two layers of detail. I'm shooting for 4 layers as most of my previous hairstyles, but that doesn't mean I'm only halfway there, quite the opposite in fact. The heavy lifting is done for this project, I'd say I'm a solid 65-70% of the way done. All that's left is to detail it and make it pretty and more hair-like with extra thinner cards.

Not sure if I'm going to have more WIP posts for this, might just go ahead and finish it, but we'll see.