She has short hair as you can see in the picture. This woman turned out to be Lupita N’yongo. I made sure I was able to spend a lot of time on the hair to really get into the skills. I decided to give this a try and made a portrait of a really pretty woman. Then Pixologic came with this extra tool in their Zbrush called Fibremesh: a tool to create hair. At the same time it’s extremely important for some characters, so I had really set my mind on wanting to learn these skills.

I was trying to hone my character creation skills and hair was always a problem. Becoming a digital hairdresserįor me personally hair has always been one of those holy grails, because it was so hard to master (especially a few years back). That’s when we knew how we could make a difference with Human Alloy: we needed to figure out how to create realistic digital hair, on a tight deadline. They all had ‘realistic hair’ really high on their wish list. It turned out that this frustration was widely shared by different prominent architectural 3D artists we spoke to – like Bertrand Benoit, Johannes Linqdvist and Peter Guthrie. Using these 3D people models always breaks the illusion of the image when they come too close to the camera. These models have hair that is part of the mesh and it actually just looks like a glob of hair-colored skin instead of nice real fluffy hair.

One of the things that really frustrated us when creating realistic illustrations, before we started Human Alloy, was the extreme poor quality of the hair on the models available at that time.

If you’re interested in reading more about ‘our’ Kevin and want to see some of his personal work, check out this interview with him. We’ve asked him to share some of his incredible skills in an article on how he creates the digital hair for our 3D people. The artist responsible for the insanely realistic digital hair of Human Alloy’s Premium models is Kevin Beckers. By: Kevin Beckers – senior 3D artists at Human Alloy

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