Hi, Reallusionists,
Friendly neighborhood Martok here.

   Well, it's been hit and miss for me thus far creating custom hair for avatars in Character Creator using the Hair Tools add on in Blender 2.93, but I think I've finally arrived at some more hits.

    I'm basing my technique off of another YouTuber who had the exact tutorial I was looking for...creating custom meshes for hair styles in Hair Tool in Blender.  From there, I am finding ways to refine the approach.

    See, Hair Tool has three general ways to create hair cards pretty much off the bat....  1. Drawing hair onto an object.
                                                                                                                                2. Creating hair cards from a selection of preset "grid" hairstyles
                                                                                                                                3. Creating hair cards from particles.

The technique I am refining will actually involve a combination of 1, and 2, and using the Sculpting tool to create almost any style from a hair card base style afterwards. 
The only real hiccup I am running into is when the textures translate over to Character Creator 3.   In Blender, the textures look nice and solid, even with the Alpha Hashed feature on for transparencies.   When I import the .obj file into CC3 or iClone7, there are areas where the texture tends to fade away a bit shorter than I'd like, giving the hair style sort of balding-looking spots...usually only on the sides.   Once I get that sorted out, I ought to be set.

Soon as I get this technique refined, I'll share the info.

Something else I have been working on is morphing hair to where a character can have a dry hair style, and then two wetlook morphs which I call "shock" and "slick".
Take a woman with even shoulder length hair for example.  Toss her in a lake (by surprise).  Chances are, when she first emerges, her hair is going to be a right mess (the "shock" wetlook), with bangs and locks down in her face as she tries to figure out what the heck just happened.  Once she's calmed down, and all thoughts of murderous retribution have cleared her mind, she will probably "slick" back her wet hair so she can actually see.  The key to the morphs is to ensure that you have not changed any vertice counts in Blender between the dry hair mesh, the shock wet hair mesh, and the slick wet hair mesh when you create the morphs in iClone7.  Combine this with the particle effects in Popcorn FX, and you can create a pretty convincing wetlook animation.

Wish me luck.




"Incompetence will always prevail so long as evil men stand by and do nothing."
-Martok2112