What is the best way to achieve Final Fantasy like hair?
 

What is the best method, modeling? Maya Hair?

Keeping in mind, it's going to be animated.

are you going for the full prerendered hair in the games, the hair that interacts with each other from the spirits within movie, or one of the realtime styles?

The Advent Children Style?
And possibly the game styles.

Or if you don't mind you can give us a run down of them all, if you want to. :)

There are many different ways.

In the Final Fantasy games, they use polygonal meshes with transparency maps on them. If the hair is long, then usually some joints are added, and are animated by hand.

In the pre-rendered and movies, they also use polygonal meshes, but drive the shape by either cloth simulation, or through dynamic curves.

I use Shave and a Haircut. It looks pretty, but I find it kind of challenging to create styles with it that keep their shape when using dynamics.

So. You're left with a few options.
1) Model the hair, and use joints for the movement.
2) Model the hair, then use cloth simulation or dynamic curves
3) Use a hair solution

I think the one with the most control, would be the first option. However, animating hair can be time consuming. If you're good with simulations, you should go with the second option. If you're doing a still, or your character has short hair, use option three.

Good luck! :)

Thanks for that, it's given me a better insight, what would be best to model the hair with, NURBS curves, and convert to polys or just leave it as NURBS....?

from what i've experienced, if you want to move your hair with joints then you're best to convert it to polygons, because joints didn't seem to like NURBS last time i tried...

if you look at the hair in FF10 then you'll see it's polygons with texture maps (at least that's what it looks like to me)

So if I'm using joints, NURBS to poly?

What about simulations?

And thanks for responding :)

Simulations are computationally expensive, and hard to work with. I recommend animating it by hand.

And yes, you can convert the nurbs strands to polys, and then bind the polys to the joints.

I suppose yeah, 'cause the animation isn't exactly going to be feature length (Although SE did animate Sephiroth's hair by hand)

I think I might not use planes though, I might actually make the hair strands 3Dimensional (I know, crazy, but oh well). Like draw the curves, loft them and stuff, but when they're polys, extrude or something, haven't decided yet. But thanks again dude.

I can't believe I forgot SE DO actually use Poly's for hair, I was reading through my Reunion Files again and saw this picture, I cba uploading it, so I just found the same scan on the net. http://blenderartists.org/forum/atta...6&d=1225235262

Yup, that's the way they did it in Advent Children.