The sandbox is a place for me to write up some tips or tutorials when I have time. Are there enough hours in the day?!

I’ve been in a hair making mood recently so I thought I’d kick off the sandbox area by talking a little about hair making or how I make hair anyway. I learned to make hair just before flexi prims came to second life but didn’t make very much until then. My first flexi hair was just made for fun and only offered in one colour but I had such a big response from people that I made more and more.

I have to confess that working with prims is not my favourite thing, skin making is my joy which is bizarre as this is one of the hardest and most time consuming of all the things that I make for second life. What I like about hair is that the prims don’t have to be ordered, regular or precise. Just playing with them and tugging them around can often produce quite pretty styles and my style of building is very much tug and play, much to the frustration of my more precise builder friends.

I think good texturing helps with hair and there are some great tutorials on the web for making hair textures. If you aren’t very good at drawing or hand painting and feel frustrated by the thought then sometimes you can make a texture from a surprising thing. Try taking a picture of the bristled head of a broom and load to your pc (or find one on the net that is copyright free to use). Crop your image so that you just have a picture of the bristled part. Set your picture as overlay, flood fill a colour layer under the overlay and play about with it, change the opacity, blur a little around the edges. You can get some dramatic effects that can look very realistic and you will surprised that unlikely things, like a plate of spaghetti or a broom head can make some excellent hair textures.

I am blond in real life so I always start a new hair textured blond. I use a pose stand and build the hair around my head. I have a very average head size on my avatar, size 50 and I find this works well for hair making. I start out with a torus prim usually, though you can use other shapes for a hair base and I like to experiment.

Place the torus on your head, impaling the ends into the avatar scalp (ouch!) and build a base all around your head. Your base shape does not have to be perfect or regular, the hair can still look very nice if it isn’t. After all real hair isn’t perfectly formed or aligned so there is no real reason why avatar hair must be.

When you’ve covered your scalp and have a basic shape, it’s time to add the shaped prims that give a style to your hair. To get your curled, wavy, or straight shapes you need to play with the torus, change the settings in the edit box and see what shapes that you can make that will work for your hair. I usually make a selection of shapes at this point and then copy them into the hair, turn them, roatate and drag until I am happy. I seldom plan hard when I make hair and often start with a vague idea that evolves as I make the hair. This hair is going to be an updo so I won’t be adding any flexi to it this time but I like cylinders for flexi myself. I feel they give the nicest, most realistic appearance and movement for hair.

Your hair style will quickly take shape and it may not turn out how you imagined it in the beginning, mine never does but I am often more pleased with the result than I might have been with my initial idea. I usually link up the parts of the hair as I go along so I don’t forget pieces. I’ll link up the base when it’s done, then will link the next 3 or 4 pieces to the base and so on. For me, the hair is finished when it looks pretty on my avatar, that’s when I decide to close and make the colours.

Then I wear the hair for the first time, adjust the position slightly, something that you nearly always need to do after wearing the first time, and then I add the colour change script I use for fun in the root prim. This script cost me 100L and is very useful and fun.

After that I will texture the hair colours that I plan to offer for sale.

This is the finished hair, I called it Salome!