HOW DO I MAKE BRAIDED HAIR IN BLENDER?
Paul Hatton replies
Getting hair right is tricky, and the challenge becomes even greater when that hair needs to be animated. Hair grooming tools in the likes of Houdini have become so advanced that the only limit seems to be an artist’s abilities. Blender contains an improving set of grooming functionality as well, but as the question focuses on braids we’ll take a more specific approach.
To help answer this one I’m indebted to Nino (AKA Defoq) for Braidify, a free tool developed alongside some incredibly helpful training videos. The first iteration was impressive, great for creating braids and animating them, but was highly processor intensive. Making changes to the output was, at times, rather slow and sucked some of the life out of the creative process. Nino listened to artist’s feedback and introduced a second, far quicker and more responsive iteration. It integrates well into Blender’s existing tools, but isn’t quite as effective at animating braids.
Braids are a complex structure formed by the interlacing of three or more strands of material. We see this most often in hair, but any type of flexible material can be braided, including textiles and wire. Re-creating braids in 3D without the help of a plugin would be tedious and cumbersome, with each strand needing to be created individually before interlacing them. This leaves the potential for clashing high, with an additional challenge around making any changes to the braid paths.
The tool we use here takes all the hard work out of creating braids by requiring a single curve that is then used to drive the braid. This curve can be edited in Sculpt mode using any of Blender’s brushes. Our answer can only cover the basics of getting you set up and pointing you in the direction of a few helpful workflows. To get to grips with this tool, just play around with it. All the parameters are in one place, and as the braids update interactively you’ll be able to see exactly how your creations respond to different settings.
Braidify is simple and straightforward, but don’t be fooled into thinking it lacks functionality and capability. The braids you can generate are realistic, predictable and suitable for production-quality work.