I'm trying another way of creating anime hair, and i think it's even worse than what i was using.
I was placing stripes of hair, which is tedious but it worked, and this other method is just a single curve and then you use another curve to create the profile of the hair stripe. It's fun and all but somehow the stripes keep rotating on themselves for no reason. when i try to rotate the direction of one point of the path curve.
@hideki This can be countered a little bit by having an extra control point before the end of the curve. You may only adjust it when you change hair directions. Also CTR + T is your friend to rotate multiple points at once. I found it sometimes helped to just reset the rotation back to zero before doing this. It's still a bit fiddly. I think Dikko explains this too in his tutorials.
Another method I saw people do is just blocking out the patch of hair they want to do as a plane and then just start extruding the strains they want before sort of bending everything in place with the proportional editing tool.
Long story short: I'm still not good at it myself but good reference and understanding how to layer hair seemed more useful to me than the methods itself. I end up using too many small strains instead of covering up large patches at once.
@Reinhard i would need to give it another try. Like you said it's very fiddly and you need ti make adjustments all the time.
I am gonna try also another method which involves creating the hair strands in a 2d plane and using several modifiers to wrap it arojnd the head. Seems to be no less tedious but it also may yield more concise results
@hideki Just a word of advice... if by chance you talk about the method "aVersionOfReality" put out a year or longer ago... just don't do it. It's not worth it. Otherwise go ahead and see what works best.
At least the concept is pretty straightforward and makes sense.
@Reinhard i can see why some people wouldn't like this approach, and maybe it's because if you try to follow it at first you may end with some flat and featureless hair. I can see also that this approach is not the ideal for all kinds of hair.
I am gonna try to re do the hair of my Rei model with this method, and i think the trick here is to do it layering spikes to make it not look as flat, and also giving the spikes some profile, not just something that would end up looking flat when subdivided. Will report results.
@hideki Truth is that I do not actually remember why. It's been too long ago. I would assume it was too many steps for such a simple result and nobody else uses this workflow. Don't get me wrong, what he does is usually mindblowing but then also impractical. Let me know if you do it anyways.