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Sasquatch long hair tutorial

Warning: this tutorial was written with LW 6.5 and Sasquatch 1.0. Certain settings or features may not work properly with the latest versions of LW and Sasquatch. I will try to update this tutorial soon to match.

Ok, well this is my first tutorial ever, so bare with me here.

This is a tutorial for creating long hair using Worley Labs' fur, hair, and grass plugin for Lightwave, Sasquatch. It is split up into two parts - the first part involves making the hair guides in Modeler, and the second part involves applying Sasquatch to the guides in Layout. While I'll be giving mostly specific steps, creating hair requires a lot of rework. Going back and forth between Modeler and Layout to adjust the guides, and going into Sasquatch over and over to get the hair settings just right. My steps are only one example - adjust them to fit your own desired style of hair.

This tutorial assumes you are proficient enough in Lightwave, so I won't be going into too much detail when it comes to standard Lightwave functions.

Also, I'm going to assume you've at least tried to make long hair once or twice and know the very basic ins and outs of the procedure (like the fact that you need to make guides and apply Sasquatch to the guides) and using Sasquatch (like how to apply all the parts of the plugin to an object and scene). That way I can concentrate on describing the steps rather than taking a lot of space and time defining terms and describing where to locate certain parameters, etc. If you're not sure about something related to Sasquatch or Lightwave, try looking in your respective manuals. If you get really frustrated, you can email me.

Finally, while most of what I explain should be version and platform independent, it should be noted that I used Lightwave version 6.5b on the Mac and Sasquatch version 1.0-DP (also for Mac) for this tutorial.

Right, on with the tutorial!



Part 1: Guides

Ironically, the most important part in making long hair with Sasquatch is not Sasquatch (herein shortened to "Sas"). It's the hair guides. You need quite a few of them (30-60), and for thick, detailed hair or for animations, you'll need a LOT (preferably at least 100, but a couple hundred would be best, especially for head shots and closeup animations). For making guides, I like using splines. This makes shaping the guides and editing them later on fairly easy. However, since a guide needs to be a "string" of connected 2-point polys, using the splines as the guides won't work. You need to convert the splines into poly chains. To do this, I prefer to use Terry Ford's CurveToPolyChain plugin. It's free, and there are versions for LW6.5 for Mac, 6.5 for Intel, and 5.6 for Intel. So if you don't have a copy of this plugin or some other way of converting splines into guides, go get it now! I'll wait........ :)


Ok, now to make our guides.

1) First thing's first - open up your head model in Modeler. If you don't have one, there's one on the LW CD, or you can even just use a sphere or something head-shaped to simulate. Put your model on the 2nd layer and put it in the background, with layer 1 as the foreground. This way, you can create your guides around your head - hmmm, what a concept...
With your model open, think about what kind of hair you want. Straight? Curly? Neck length? Shoulder length? Parted in the middle? Parted on the side? Bangs? No bangs? You might want to draw the basic shape of your hair to get the idea firm in your mind and remember for later. But try to decide now, otherwise, you'll be spending a lot more time reediting your guides than you need to.

For this tutorial, I'll be making neck length styled hair with bangs.



2) Now, using whatever tool you prefer, create a curve for the first guide in the front/back view. I use the points tool, and I draw out about five points (more points will give you more control and make it so you don't have to add them later, which can be a pain; whereas fewer points will make it easier to sculpt the hair at the beginning because the guides won't be so filled with points, but you'll have to add more points as you progress to give more shape), starting with one below the scalp and ending with one around the base of the neck on the left side of the head (right side of the Back view). Then, looking at the top view, move the curve so it's lying on the X axis, and the first point (the one on the left, below the scalp, herein called the root) is a bit away from the center.



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