Blender's NEW Hair System! (3.3)

Talking about Blender's new hair system.

00:00 - New Hair System
00:35 - The Blog Post
01:30 - New Curves System
03:12 - Spherical Brush
04:30 - Different Workflows
05:17 - Destructive Workflow
07:47 - Procedural Workflow
09:04 - Procedural Destructive Tools
10:38 - A New Idea
12:40 - The Next Steps
13:12 - Give it a Try!
13:21 - Summary
13:43 - Closing Thoughts

#blender

[xDaShaanx]

I am truly glad that I started learning 3D with Blender while covid lockdown. It was probably the best decision seeing how far blender has come and improving day by day. Also thanks curtis for all the content and knowledge.

[TomWDW]

I love waking up to a new Curtis Holt video :-) 🖌🖌

[Gredran]

It’s truly amazing what they’re doing with this and Project Heist in general!

I know Blender’s free and of course that’s what makes all of this more amazing, but I HIGHLY recommend the $17 for a month to look at what they’re doing at the Blender Studio Cloud site!

Not only are they using Geometry Nodes for hair, but yesterday’s production log detailed how they are trying to come up with a system using Geometry Nodes that can make it so when you have shape keys and rigs for a character, when you add the higher detail and the displacements, it all works the exact same and doesn’t need any tweaking. (Small edit, it wasn’t yesterday, it was May’s production log. I think they’ve already got that system working as this main character has gotten more detailed)

So not just with hair, but they’re reallyyy trying to push it in other things too :)

What Sprite Fright did for cartoony and stylization, they said they’re using Project Heist(this new film) to FINALLY make it so Blender isn’t just “oh it’s good but only for stylized stuff!”

Great rundown as always!

[larastarslayer]

i really can't wait for the hair update. I'm glad you pointed out the hair will self-animate as well. Which I missed when I watched it. Super excited about that! 🖌

[Slingshooting_Downunder]

I love how seamlessly they're currently merging the destructive vs non-destructive approaches. So powerful already, and I can't wait to see how it works with the dynamics systems 🖌

[CHILLAH]

I understand the node based sculpting brushes as some sort of brush presets.
Let say you use one of the "disposable" GeoNodes to add an effect for combing. you tweak the parameters in the geonodes untill you get the desired effect. If you want to use this effect in the future you simply create a preset from the geoNode with the current parameters. Kind of like your "get default" and "set default" operation in the Material Tools from Holt Tools V5.
I might be totally in the dark here and I am curious how other will interpretate this. After all this is still a new idea so lots of changes will come.
Cheers🖌

[GaryParris]

it's all heading in a very interesting direction indeed. the devs are really thinking their way through this, it's great to see them being creative in a coding way :) 🖌

[Mincher]

It's crazy how good it looks, being in EEVEE! 🖌

[bububirb]

Really interesting to see new hair tools that make use of geometry nodes. Can't wait to see how it evolves! 🖌️

[jdtx]

🖌 Nicely done Curtis, looking forward to seeing this develop 🖌

[cr]

There is already a hair particle system with a hairstyle edit function. What is the difference between the New Hair System and the old one?

[AmberScottProd]

The "Just Paint" philosophy for tool design is really interesting, I like it. 🖌

[roccoguglielmi]

Wow, Blender development is really moving along rapidly!🖌

[jeffg]

Curtis, I've thought of two add-ons for you, since you're kinda the "add-on guy" now.
1) "hair cards" baker - perhaps the camera grabs images from different angles rotating around the head, and from above center and below center angles to get some top, middle, and lower cards, perhaps 8 around head in total in each layer, so 24 transparent hair cards on the head. Might need to do like a duplication of the hair from a hidden one, make the duplicated one visible, chop off the back segments, then do render. then start over for next segment. Something like that - I'm sure it can be worked out.
2) ProtoDots - A plugin where you just label spheres basically and the label shows up on it, and you also can pick a color (with procedural camera coordinates based texture, so no matter what angle, you always see the text that was entered for that dot - like a billboard in a way)
someone would use the dots for prototyping scenes for animations - don't really need a real object for the root animation, so makes it easy to block out.
The dots just easily show what it is without needing a complicated mesh that represents that thing. Personally, I think "high level animator" (I don't know what the role is really called) will be a big job in the industry soon.

[kevinhand]

While I'm not a hair expert, I'm still really excited with the new Hair system in 3.3! Thanks for another great video Curtis! 🖌

[genesis]

In theory, from this description this looks like node based brushes. I thought about it, this could be useful like for example controlling how many hairs you add with noise and so on, but there are so many more needed nodes that I don't think this is really the most time sensitive feature. Solvers are way more important, few mesh nodes are also really missing like tesselate, better booleans, bevel, disolve, blur/smooth attribute, the shortest path, fill holes, and I doubt there is enough man power there, and I'm still waiting for even thickness for extrude mesh, and curve to mesh have still same issue with uneven radius. There are so many more needed things in Blender that I really hope they won't go too deep with those brushes for now.

[ennyoy]

Haha, the end got confusing. What I got from it was the idea of custom procedural brushes; which may or may not be destructive. Whatever it meant, it sounded cool🖌

[wolfgangtell]

Hi, have you figured out how to convert the hair to a usable mesh outside of blender? I have tried everything I can think of, and I just don't find a use for this outside blender which is a teasing shame to offer such great and easy hair making and not be able to use it in our games or sell the creations in marketplaces. I have already contacted Blender and have not received a response about it. If you figure it out, can you make a quick video on the process, please?

[RkRaoM]

How to export 3.3 new hair system through fbx...?
Hair curves not convert into mesh...
Any idea pls...

[donadesignsind]

Amazing video as usual, the nails are absolutely fab! One thing I didn’t like was the brush emoji so I’m gonna use 💇‍♀️