 Hello and welcome to this overview walkthrough of the new hair tools that are coming up in Blender 3.3. I'm Andy and I'm currently working at the Blender Studio on Project Heist, which is a new open-movie project rendered in Eevee. And we're developing the new hair tools alongside production. Here you can see our main character and you can download this file on the Blender Studio platform along with many other files. And yeah, let me just give you a rundown of what it's made of. So first we have the beard and then we have some messy hair on top of the beard. Like they're really fine. You can almost not see them, but they're there. We have the eyebrows, we have eyelashes, we have the head hair and again some messy hair that sits on top of it. Then we have ear hair and nose hair and the mustache and also some messy mustache hair. Now the reason why we chose a character like this for this hair experiment is that it's relatively easy to make a character like this with shaggy hair. And it's very, very hard to get away with let's say a super styled character with very precisely groomed hair. It's very difficult, so since it's just a startup project for this new system we thought, okay let's try it with this and then later as the complexity increases we can also get away with more styled hairstyles. Alright, so how do we start from scratch? Like with nothing. Let's just say we're going to replace the beard for now. Let's hide those beard objects and I'll give you a rundown of all the tools alongside making that beard. So let's make sure we have our face, our head mesh selected and I'm going to add a new empty hair object. You can see it got added, our surface that we had selected initially is associated with it, but if it's not there we can also just select it from the drop down, that's fine. And yeah, we can't see anything right now. There's no hair in this object, so let's add some hair. We can go to the new hair sculpt mode or curve sculpt mode I should say. And there we have a bunch of tools and yeah, we'll just add the hair by using the add tool. And you can see that the hair looks kind of chunky right now. That is because we are rendering it as strips, we can also set it to render as strands. Let's just choose strands for now because that way we don't have to assign the thickness to the hair. We're just kind of at the moment still a bit messy. You have to do it in geometry nodes because yeah, you can't access the settings here. So let's just have it on strand and yeah, we have the add tool and we can add single hairs. We can change the number of hairs that we're adding here in this little option. F, like in all the other brush settings in Blender, changes the size of the tool and we can just drag along the surface and add some hair. Now there's also mirroring, so let me just do this and add some hairs on both sides. I'm choosing X mirroring and you can see the beauty of this is that the hairs themselves don't get mirrored. So we still have individual hairs on both sides and we don't have any mirroring artifacts. But all the operations still get executed on both sides, which is pretty neat. Except when you want to add single hairs, then it is getting mirrored. Likewise, we can delete hair just by choosing the delete tool. It's relatively straightforward and simple. And yeah, there's also a bunch of options here to interpolate the length, the shapes and the point count, but we'll all disregard them for now. The absolutely mind-boggling thing about this new system is that you have spherical and projected brushes. In the old system, we had only projected brushes. So if you do something like this, for example, I should increase it. If you do something like this, you would work only on the view projected area. And you'd have to dance around a lot and rotate around. And with a spherical brush type, it's so much easier because you're actually adding a brush stroke in 3D space. What that means for our other tools, I'm going to show you later. Right now, I'm just going to add some hair to make up our beard. And you can see that the more hair I'm adding, right now it's not that much of an issue because the system distribution is fairly balanced, but it's relatively easy to make hairs that are very close to each other. And for a naturalistic hairstyle that sometimes doesn't look that nice. It looks very artificial very quickly. So for that, we have a new tool called the density brush. And the density brush is super good for adding and removing hair, but keeping the distance between the hairs relatively ironed out, relatively smooth. The density brush has different modes. We can choose to add hair or only remove hair or work in auto, which does both. It tries to remove hair by keeping a certain density and add hair at the same time. So let's just do that. We can change the minimum distance between the hairs using this slider here. But we can also use Shift R, which gives us a nice preview here. And this grid kind of shows us how dense the hair should be in this area. I can make it less dense. You can see it here. And the cool thing is that this brush also works with the strength setting. It's not completely absolute. I can set the strength to 1 and then we're just plastering hair on top of everything. But we can also just choose something in between and then using the Tablet Pressure, we can do very fine graduations, which is super, super awesome. And of course, if I only want to remove hair, I'm going to go to Remove Mode and choose a relatively coarse distribution. And like this, I can iron out the distribution along the whole object. This is super handy because if you're working in a destructive workflow like this, you are balancing distribution quite a lot. So the density brush is super useful at that. Now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to imply a sense of direction into the hair. And the easiest thing we can do here at this point is using the comb brush. And now comb is similar to what we had before in the particle hair systems. But now we have the benefit of having a spherical brush in addition to a projected brush. So I'm just going to choose, I'm just going to let the hair sort of sag down here. And sometimes it helps to switch between spherical and projected just because projected works on a few hairs that we can see right now a bit better. But generally I'd just like to use spherical. You can see that we also don't have any surface collision right now. So you have to kind of watch out a little bit that you're not intersecting your base mesh. And I'm going to make the hair appear kind of appear as if it's growing downward or so. This is pretty rough. Just stay with me here. Alright, next thing is we want to change the length a little bit. And for that we're going to use a new tool called the snake hook. And snake hook kind of works like in sculpt mode. It's pretty useful for defining the overall length of the hair. Just by pulling out the hair it just kind of grows. And it's actually super, super funny to use it on moustaches. So if I just go to the mustache here I can do this. Yes, beautiful. Yeah, so you can see snake hook is pretty useful for these very broad strokes where you want the hair to kind of follow your brush stroke. But I find it also to be very useful for giving the hair a lot of subtle length variation. Like this for example. So we're just pulling out single hairs and we're messing it up a little bit and making it a little bit more shaggy. And we can do the same here on our beard. So we'll just pull out a few areas. Alright, now you can see the hair is very uneven in length. We can of course tweak that by using the grow and shrink brush. Now the grow and shrink brush is kind of different to what there is currently for particle editing. Because the growing tries to keep sort of the direction of the hair and shrinking as well. So we can grow just by drawing and we can remove by hitting down control or shrink by hitting down control. So with that we can also kind of trim the hair. And you can see it kind of tries to keep the overall shape of the hair. We can use the old method of scaling which is also sometimes useful. And here you can see it just scales the hair up which depending on what you want, what kind of result you want to achieve you can choose one or the other. Next up there is pinching and it kind of works like in sculpt mode. You can also change the intensity by holding down shift F. And yeah, you can pinch hair. Again, it's very important which kind of mode you're choosing here, spherical or projected because I found it in projected a little bit too, I know, very artificial looking. So depending on what kind of result you want you might want to choose spherical instead of projected here. So with spherical you're really doing a brush stroke in 3D space and with that it's super easy to just pinch a few hairs together. Alright, there's also smoothing. So with smoothing you're currently ironing out any kinks that we have in the hair so let me just rough it up a little bit like this. If I go smooth it makes the hair curves look smoother. Very simple, very nice. Then there's puffing which aligns the curves with the normal of the surface mesh so it kind of makes the hair stand up, also super useful. And then there is slide which is very, very handy if you want to control the density of the hair. Like let's say we want to iron out the graduation between this empty area and this full area here we can just slide a few hairs along the surface outwards and make this a little bit more of a gradual transition. Also super useful when you're doing a very dense groom. Now what about selection? This is something I left out so far. You can see here we have the selection paint brush and selection is super important when you're doing a groom. You don't want to work on all the areas at once and kind of accidentally brush over something that you carefully sculpted into the system. So selection is super helpful. Right now we have a paint selection mode again you change the size by pressing F and selection has different modes. There is the control point mode which is currently active so with this we can select control points and then there is curve which selects the whole curve and we're adding to the selection by holding down shift and we're removing the selection by holding down control. Alt A deselects everything, A selects everything. Sometimes you have something deselected then nothing is going to happen if you're, for example, comb over something. In that case just press A and then you have everything selected again. With selection paint you can also extend the selection which is very very handy. You can find those tools here in the select menu. Growing is currently invoked with shift A as well. So if I hold shift A you can see I can grow or shrink the selection with my cursor which is super super useful. This is extremely useful for example if you want to work on only the tips like let's say we want to clump together the tips of this beard. We can select the endpoints. So for that we have to be in the control point selection mode and I'm going to go here select endpoints. You can see the endpoints are selected but we can grow the selection with shift A again and then just carefully choose the type of distribution that we want. Now we can go and pinch only the tips of the hair and then we're just going to select everything by hitting down A. So currently these are the available tools and of course you can have different brushes, different settings for these brushes different types of spacing which is super super handy. But yeah this gets you to your desired target in a certain way along the way but not all the way because it still kind of looks very orderly and we're missing some randomness in this to look fully naturalistic. So currently we are relying on a few workarounds using geometry nodes and they're not really workarounds they're actually super cool tools that we discovered along the way. For that we're going to use the modifier stack and we made a few geometry node systems that help us introduce randomness and we're working with these geometry nodes destructively and non-destructively. So what does that mean? Well I want to introduce some randomness first. So let's say we want to squiggle up the hair a little bit for that we have a hair noise system here and you can see if I just increase the strength the hair is going to become a little bit more noisy and this is a really simple geo node system nothing overly fancy or so but with that we just have a very quick way of applying some randomness to the hair. Now we can choose to just keep this here and we can keep grooming, we can keep combing in curved sculpt mode or we can just apply this. Like let's say I'm happy with this how it looks like I'm just going to apply it and now we can keep working with it, we can pinch and we can actually break the symmetry. Let's say we want to increase the density of this because I'm kind of happy with how this looks like and I'm just going to add some more hair. I'm going to make the hair brush, the hair density brush super strong and I'm just going to brush along here and add more hair. Now let's say that the length of the hair it's a bit random right now but it's still a little bit too uniform so for that we made a modifier that just varies up the length it's called randomized lengths and with that we can just define a minimum and a maximum for the hair length. You can preview it, preview it, here we go. Let's say this is a little bit too shaggy so that's just vary the length in a super subtle way and I like this and I'm going to apply it. Now I can just grow the front of the beard a little bit more using the grow and shrink brush and I'm going to pinch a little bit more. Let's just brush this down a little bit. Alright so if we keep doing this if we keep tweaking and grooming we eventually reach a state where we're happy with our hairstyle and this is what we're at currently in Project Heist I mean this is still going to change probably and we're going to keep developing the tools along. Currently this workflow is mostly destructive that it means that we're applying an operation and then we can't go back. Now we are testing a little bit more of a non-destructive workflow as well where remember we had these messy hair objects which are really just the same data copied twice so we have the beard object and the beard messy and you can see the hair curve data is still being shared between those two objects. And in the messy part we have a few more modifiers here in the modifier stack and it's basically these two we have one that's called delete hair so let me just hide the main beard we have one here and that deletes most of the hair. It's a very simple geometry node operation that just deletes a random bunch of splines and then on top of that we are applying some excessive noise and that just gets added on top of on top of our main groom so for example I can make the strength a bit stronger and you can see the messy hairs are sticking out a little bit more and the cool thing is that since we're sharing the same data we can just keep updating the beard groom and it's the messy part is also going to update. So that's it for this demonstration of the current state of the hair tools in Blender 3.3. Thanks so much to Dalai, Jacques and Hans for developing these tools and listening to our ramblings about how this system should work and yeah, thank you so much for watching. Bye.