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| Step One: Two Large Final Renders |
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When I do an image, I generally do two things that relate to making the hair look realistic.
- When I am happy with the image and ready to go for a final render, I set the image size to something very large. For example, for a 640x480 image, I set the output size to 2048x1532 (twice 1024x768). When drawing the hair, I work on the large image. When I'm finally happy with it, then I'll shrink it down. This makes the hair strands appear very fine.
- I render two versions of the image, one with hair props and one without. I take both of these renders and import them into Photoshop as layers, one on top of the other, then save the document. The version without hair provides a clean background, and the one with hair provides much-needed shadows on other objects, especially around the figure's shoulder and neck area. In Photoshop, I place the layer with the hair prop on top of the one without. More on this in a moment.
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| Final Render with hair prop. Notice that the hair is not texture or transparency mapped. I don't bother with that since I'm going to be drawing over the hair anyway. |
Final Render without hair prop. I rendered this image in Ray Dream Studio 5.5. To get rid of the hair, I simply selected it in the timeline window and then clicked the "cloak" check box on the "general" tab of the properties window. If you're using a different application you may have to do it a little differently, but the principle is the same. |
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| An excellent character-driven sci-fi story. I did the book cover illustration, "At the Window". |
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