Quick tip: Master Haircards with awesome Magno Coutinho - 3D.sk Blog (2025)

Find out how Magno skillfully crafts hairstyles using Maxon Zbrush and Maya. Make sure to show appreciation for his stunning work by liking and following his ArtStation profile. A big thank you to Magno for sharing this Quick Tip with us.

When you start from a straight hairdcard and manually adjust it to fit your hairstyle it can be very challenging and time consuming to have a nice flow for each strand, but doing it this way you don’t need to worry about that as the tube from Zbrush are very easy to model with a nice flow.

The reason why I like and recommend this workflow is that drawing curves in Zbrush is very simple and it makes it easy to get an interesting flow for each curve.

— Magno Coutinho

Also, by using GS CurveTools you get to adjust the hair cards’ edge density at any point, so it is easy to optimize the hairstyle even after it is done. The hairstyle in this example is 25k Tris. The software used for creating the hair cards’ textures in the case was Fibershop and I really recommend it as well for its simplicity and ease of use.

1. Hair masses

After deciding the hairstyle you want to make, create a blockout in zbrush using the Curve Tool Brush. Start from the bottom layers and build up from it, slowly covering the whole head. This is very important as it will ensure the hair looks full in all areas of the head.

Once the blocking is done I’ll use the live surface feature in Maya to draw curves on top of each tube from the blocking. Finally I used the amazing plugin GS CurveTools to generate cards for each curve and then I manually adjusted the cards’ segments, UVs, etc. The same way as in Zbrush, I’m starting from the bottom layer and I make sure each layer is very well defined before moving on to the next one.

2. Final touch – flyaway hair

After I’m done distributing all the layers I bring the hair cards to Zbrush and I’ll use the curve tubes once again to create flyways. And I’d then repeat the process in Maya to convert these tubes to hair cards.

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