Adding detail to the hair

After my experiments with fibermesh, I decided to go back to sculpted hair. The initial hair I had created needed refinement so I spend some time doing that. I used the clay brush, along with alpha 01. I changed the settings of the alpha in the alpha pallet under modifiers and increased the H tiles to 3 giving me the desired results of having 3 soft lines every time I sculpted. I tried not to use them in straight lines as this would look unnatural and she was supposed to have curly hair so I waved them in the direction they were going. After I had finished sculpting I started to create separate strands that would come off the model and make the hair seem more realistic. I did this by masking out lines on the model that I wanted to lift away, and then I used the extract option under the sub tool pallet to separate them. It took me hours to separate the lines using the trim options once they had been extracted, moving them away from the sculpted hair using the move brush, smoothing them out into a rounded strand with the smooth brush.

 

 

After around 7 hours of trying to do this I accepted that unfortunately I didn't have the time to finish it. In heinsight I feel that it was too much to expect to be able to do this with plaited hair as that was what was causing most of the problems. If the hair had been straight or wavy I would have been able to achieve this a lot quicker and easier. Below on the left you can see the results of what I had done. This has been a heavy learning curve for me, and in future I must analyze if something is achievable before embarking upon it, but also after two hours attempting to do it I should have given up and moved on. On the right you can see my final hair. I'm not 100% happy with it, but as I have never sculpted hair before it was a challenge and I'm glad I attempted it.