Hair and Particle Systems - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 131

Figure 9-10: The fur for the Bat Creature. While the 3D
Viewport gives a good estimate of what the hair is doing,
a render will really show you what areas need attention.
Here, I set the skin of my character to black to see the hair
on its own and rendered it with a simple three-point light
setup. (See Chapter 12 to learn how to set up materials and
Chapter 13 for lighting.)

Figure 9-11: The Peach Fuzz particle system for the Bat
Creature adds fine hairs covering most of the body.

Complex haircuts
The hair for the Bat Creature was pretty simple, so
let's look at a character with a more complex hairdo.
The character in Figure 9-12 uses several different
particle systems, each of which covers different areas
of the overall hairstyle. Each system is restricted to
its own area by a separate vertex group, allowing it
to be edited separately.
Creating hair this way makes it easier to iterate
through different styles and create more complex
hair because you can edit individual aspects without
worrying about their effect on others.
Figure 9-13 shows a character that makes full
use of this strategy with different hair particle sys-
tems that all use different settings. For example, the
braids in the beard are single parent strands that
use the Braid Kink setting for children, while other
systems use different kink settings. This technique is
often useful when creating a hairstyle with a parting

Peach Fuzz
I also decided to add a second particle system to my
Bat Creature to incorporate some short hair that
covered more of the body, like the head, ears, and
some of the wings. I made this in exactly the same
way as the first system. I started by adding another
new particle system to the same object as the first,
this time with a much shorter length. Then, I cre-
ated a vertex group to limit this hair to the body,
head, and the beginnings of the wings. I didn't need
a length vertex group this time, as the hair was all
very short. Next, I combed the hair to follow the
contours of the body and added child particles to
increase the hair density. The resulting particle sys-
tem can be seen in Figure 9-11.