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Looking for the Blender 2.49 version of this tutoria? Check out the archive.

 

            NOTE: In this tutorial, just like nearly all of my tutorials, I have provided what I call keystrokes lines. These are highlighted throughout the tutorial and are meant to allow you to see the actual keystrokes that I went through in order to get the results I get in the tutorial. More advanced users should be able to go through a tutorial without the keystrokes lines assuming I have explained myself sufficiently.

 

            Grass is a very popular topic for tutorials but in many cases I find that the tutorials are lacking in explanation or don't tell you anything more than throwing it on the plane. They leave it up to the user to spend the time to search and try to figure things out for themselves. Well, luckily for you, I write my tutorials a little differently. I like to tell you more than just the bare bones steps. Anyways, let's get started with it.

 

The Basic Setup

            Alright, let's get the bare basics down here. This is the stuff you will find in most tutorials that go over grass/hair/fur in Blender. If you have the default cube, we are going to keep it, if not, add a cube to the scene. In order to use hair we need to use the particle system. So, select the cube and go to the particle settings. Once there, you should see an empty box with a plus and a minus button. Click on the plus button to make the cube an emitter.

 

            Select the Cube, Go to Particle Settings, Click the Plus

 

            To make the particles emit as hair we only need to change one setting,  a pop-out setting called 'type'. Currently it is set to emitter. Change that to hair and you should see a bunch of straight lines coming out of the cube, this is the hair. The first thing we need to do is make it look a bit more like hair and not like needles. To do this, I am going to increase the amount of hairs from 1000 to 5000. I am also going to go to the Velocity section and change Normal to 0.100 and Random to 0.200.

 

Change Amount to 5000, Normal to 0.l00, Random to 0.200

 

            That's all there is to making hair in Blender. However, this is just the bare basics and only involves the initial creation of the hair. Next up, we are going to go over adding materials to your hair.

 

Spicing it up

            Since we have gotten the very bare basics down, we can move on to the more fun stuff. Just like almost anything else in Blender you can do pretty much anything you want when it comes to materials and textures for your hair. However, while it is quite simple to get each strand their own color using a texture on the emitter, it is not quite so each to have the color change as you go from root to tip, as shown below.

 

 

            Before we do anything else, we need to add a material to our hair. To do that, just go to the materials settings with our hairy cube selected. While there, I usually like to change the preview to the hair preview, you can do that if you like. The only real reason I wanted to go to the materials section was to point out the strand section. This is where you can change the way that each of the hairs looks in terms of how wide it is and how it is shaped. I'm just going to let you play around with those settings to see what they do.

 

            Go to the materials settings, Check out the strand section

 

            Ok, let's get to the important stuff. All of the necessary settings that we need to change are in the texture settings, so lets head over there now. The first thing that we need to do is change the type to Blend. This is in the pop-out list labeled 'type'. When you do that, you should see a gradient window appear below it. To change the colors in the gradient we need to go down to the Colors section. Check the 'Ramp' box and the gradient editor should appear. Edit it to the colors you like.

 

            Go to the texture settings, Change type to Blend, Go to Colors section, Turn on Ramp, Set your colors

 

            Now that we have the colors set up, we need to change some settings in the mapping section. In the coordinates pop-out we need to change generated into Strand and in the projection pop-out we need to change Flat into cube. Once you do that, you should be able to render your hair and see the strands use the gradient we made for it's color starting from root to tip.

 

            Go to the Mapping section, change Coordinates setting to Strand, Change the Projection setting to Cube

Special Emission Points

            At this point, we have gotten hair to emit from our cube and we have gotten them all colored up nicely. Let's go a step further and have the hair only emit from the top of the cube. Here is what we are going after:

 

            I am going to show you how to do this using vertex groups. To get started we need to select our cube and go into edit mode. Select everything and click on the subdivide button on the left panel of the screen. I clicked it three times. After that, select all of the vertices on the top of the cube, excluding the ones on the edges. These selected vertices are going to be where our hair is going to emit out of, not within the area selected, but in the are near those points. This is why we are not selecting the edges.

 

            Select the cube, Go to edit mode (Tab), Select All, Click subdivide 3 times, select the top vertices

            While you still have those vertices selected, we need to assign them to a vertex group. To do that we need to go to the Object Data settings. This is the button right to the left of the materials button. Once of the sections is labeled 'Vertex Groups'. Open it up and click on the plus. You should see a new Group appear in the box, once that happens click on the assign button to assign our selected vertices to that group.

            Go to Object Data settings, Add a vertex group, Click the assign button

 

            Now there is one last thing we need to do before our hair will emit out of those vertices. Go to the particle settings and at the very bottom you should see a section labeled Vertexgroups. Click on the field next to 'Density' and select the name of the vertex group we made (most likely 'Group', probably the only one too). After that, if you are in object mode, that hair should only be emitting out of our vertex group.

 

            Go to Particle settings, Go to the vertexgroups section, Click on the 'Density' field and select the group

 

 

            Of course, you are not limited to having your hair emit out of only one spot. You can easily select a bunch of vertices that are not connected to each other.

 

Playing With Your Hair

            Here is the last thing I am going to go over about your hair and, in my opinion, it is the most fun part of the whole process. For instance, you can comb your hair, you can puff your hair, you can cut your hair, and so on. It's also very simple to get to these tools, especially compared to the process we had in Blender 2.49. All you have to do is change Object Mode to Particle Mode and all of your tools will appear on the left hand side of the 3D viewing window. That's all there really is to this part. Just play around with the tools to get a feel for what each of them do and how they work.

 

            Go to Particle Mode, Play with your hair

 

 

            Before I end this tutorial, there is something that you do need to keep in mind when using these tools. Once you start, you cannot go back to the particle settings and change any of the grayed out settings. This is because you will lose all of your changes if you do. To open up those settings again, you need to hit the free edit button that is right under the Type setting. This will revert the hair to what it was before you started changing it in particle mode.