Male Facial Hair from Scratch

Difficulty: moderate

Tools you’ll need:

♦ GIMP

This tutorial will explain in depth the method of adding a facial hair on one of the male heads. Tutorial was written using Adobe Photoshop CS2, however GIMP may prove suitable if it contains the same functions.

1. Many of the male heads packaged with KotOR and KotOR2 are prefectly suited to having light facial hair -- either a goatee, a short beard, or stubble. In this tutorial I will, in detail, explain one method for making facial hair on a pre-existing head texture.

2. The first step is to choose a head to make the beard or goatee on. I will be working with the fifth caucasian head (pmhc05.tga). To make things easier for myself, I am going to extract the head and import it into my modelling program, so I can see my changes in real-time. You don’t have to do this, but it will be very helpful. I also have a plugin called TexPorter, which will allow me to export the flat skinmap, so I know exactly where a certain surface ends. I will overlay this skinmap over the texture so I have something of an outline of where I need to texture (see below).

   

3. Our next step will be to outline the area we want to be the facial hair. In this case I am going to start with a goatee. Once you have your goatee outlined to your satisfaction, make a new layer and fill this selection with black.

   

4. You may want to make a copy of this layer and hide it, just in case you make a change later that you don’t like. When you’re ready, add a noise filter over the layer (the more noise you have, the more hair you will have at the end, so you may have to experiment). This next bit is key to getting the right effect. Make a circular selection around your beard layer, so that the center of the circle is near the top left corner of the beard layer.

   

   Then use a radial blur on the filter set to zoom. After some tweaking, I set the blending mode to soft light, then duplicated the layer and set the new layer to hard light with 30% opacity with the following results:

   

   Now this probably isn’t exactly how it should look, so the next step is to darken where necessary, and possible erase some parts to give it a “fading” look. To do this we’ll need to feather our selections, and maybe use the burn and dodge tools. As you can see below, a few minor changes will really make all the difference in the real-ness of your texture. All I did was I erased a bit of the hair with a 5-pixel blur, then I darkened one of the layers with the burn tool until it seemed to match the hair color. Because I didn’t erase all of my selection, it gives the effect that the hair is not cut at a razor’s edge.

   

   By simply repeating this process, you can change your goatee into a full beard:

   

5. With a little more tweaking, our finished product looks like this:

   

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