Hair and Particle Systems - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 130

when adding extra hairs to an area
you have already combed. For exam-
ple, with the Bat Creature, I added
some extra hairs to the ears and
around the feet and hands to better
define the flow of the hair around
these areas.

Particles in the Particles tab to
see what effect it has on the look
of your hair. Set the child type to
Interpolated and set the Display
number of particles to about 50 .
(The Render number can be a
lot higher, but keep in mind how
this will affect the total number
of hairs and thus your render
times.)
For the Bat Creature, I set
Virtual Parents to 0.3 and Clump
to 0.5, and I added a very small
amount of Random, Endpoint,
and Uniform Roughness (around
0.001 to 0.01 for each, as these
are sensitive settings). Turning up
the virtual parents gives the child
particles more parent strands to
clump around and prevents the
hair from looking too patchy.
Adding some roughness makes
it look less neat and smooth.
I also added some variation
to the particle length using a
Length setting of 0.5, and I set
the threshold value to 0.15 to pro-
duce hair of different lengths and
to give a more natural look to the
fur (see Figure 9-9).

Styling Tips
Be sure when styling to rotate the
model frequently to see it from dif-
ferent angles. As you rotate it, think
about the silhouette you are carving
out as well as the direction the hair
is pointing and use the Cut tool
to trim stray hairs that disrupt the
silhouette. If you cut any hairs too
short, you can use the Length brush
to grow hair back out.
You can select and manipulate
individual or multiple hairs as you
would in Edit mode, using the right
mouse button to select and the G ,
S , and R keys to grab, rotate, and
scale strands. You can also switch
between different selection methods
in Particle mode, selecting either
the whole hair or individual points
along it or just choosing to comb
and cut the overall path. This is
analogous to being able to choose
between selecting vertices, edges, or
faces in Edit mode. Selecting hair
strands can be useful for dealing
with tricky areas, as the brush tools
will work only on selected strands,
allowing you to select specific parti-
cle hairs that are causing issues and
comb or cut them in isolation.
Another useful trick is to press
L to select hairs under the cursor.
Hold down L and wave the mouse
over an area to select a few hairs at
random. Then, comb them indepen-
dently. This works well for roughen-
ing up hair and adding volume.

* Returning to Particle mode

will hide your child particles by
default, but you can turn them
on in the draw options in the 3D
Viewport Tool Shelf by checking
the Children option.

When working on hair sys-
tems, it can be useful to render
occasionally, as the shading of
hairs in the 3D Viewport can
look flat and ambiguous. You may
want to skip to Chapter 12 for a
discussion of materials for hair
and then create a quick render
setup for use while you are work-
ing on hair (see Figure 9-10). See
Chapter 13 for how to light the
scene and Chapter 14 for more on
rendering.

Child Particles
Once you have the basic hairstyle
roughly in place, turn on Child Figure 9-9: Particle settings for the Bat

Creature