How I make static hairs (crops and redraws) with FireAlpaca (1 Viewer)

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Part 1: Intro, examples, and reference images

Hey guys, sometimes people ask how I make my static hairs, or what programs I use. I figured I would document my process and turn it into a sort of tutorial. This is just how I do it with the tools at my disposal, this isn't the only way, you can use basically any raster art program you want, and if you find a different workflow that works for you, feel free to go with your gut and ignore me. But FireAlpaca is a free program built specifically for drawing 2d art, unlike something like photoshop, so I encourage you to give it a try and see how it feels for you. If nothing else, I can really only hope this might help get some higher quality imports. Feel free to try and follow along with the tutorial if you'd like.

The first thing you need to do is decide what source images you want to work with. If you have a specific character in mind, try to scrub through the source material for good reference images to work with. This is usually pretty easy with anime characters, just skim through episodes and keep an eye out for any sideshots of them. Most hairs are made this way. If you can't find any (or the show is long and you simply don't want to go though every episode, which is fair), try to look for artbook scans, or other places you might find concept art to see if you can find an official turn-around of them. Usually, you can find those easily on the character's wiki page. My Furina hair, for example, was cropped directly from her turn-around.

If your character is from a game, you could also get an in-game screenshot of their side profile and use that as a redraw reference. Failing that, you could also just find a rip of their model and put it into a 3d model viewer. Models Resource can help you in these cases. I used this for my ffxiv and kh hairs, and also my Coco Bandicoot hair. Though of course, these would usually make for terrible crops, so try to just use it for references, if you can.

Obviously, if you're the sort who's artistically inclined and willing to put in the time, you can also just draw freehand using a regular 3/4 or such image of the character as a reference, intuiting the profile design yourself, like I did with my Pit and Dark Pit hairs. Though, if you're the type who feels confident enough for that, you probably don't need a tutorial to tell you that.

In general, try to follow the same principles as the requesting guidelines to make things easier for yourself.

For these tutorials, I'll be using these images of Yuzuki and Tsukuyo from the anime TenPuru posted by Otherblack in the requests section

Once you've got your reference images, you need to decide if you're going to make them into a crop, or a redraw. Anime styled hairs with not too many details make for good crops, while hair that will require a bit more TLC to get it looking good in SDT are best to do as full redraws. We'll be using the Yuzuki hair to demonstrate cropping, and the Tsukuyo hair to demonstrate redrawing.

Now that you've got your image, make sure you've got the static hair template, which you can find here if you don't already have it. Save that template somewhere you won't lose it and keep it on hand. Now open the template in FireAlpaca, and we'll work from there.

 

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Part 2: Crops

Now then, the first thing we're going to do is save our Yuzuki hair and slap it into Waifu2x. this step isn't strictly necessary if you have a nice, big, high quality reference, but this one is a bit smaller than ideal, and it's always better to be safe than sorry. Art will always look WAY better being sized down than being sized up, which will end up artifacted and blurry. Just make sure it isn't noticeably lower quality than the template, and you should be fine. As for what waifu2x settings to use, it doesn't particularly matter so long as it doesn't look blurry and bad. Play around with settings and see what works. You can see the settings I used here.

Now, save that image, open it in the template under "File > Open as new layer" or just "Edit > Paste" if you'd rather just copy and paste. You might also want to make another layer between the reference and template to make the cuttout easier to see. I usually use a nice forest green, it's easy on the eyes and makes artifacts easy to catch. Now wee need to cut out the hair. You can freehand this with the eraser if you'd like. If you're using a mouse or a trackpad, there's a setting above your image tabs on the righthand side that says "Stabilizer (Global)". Set that number nice and high, it will probably help you a lot. I almost always have mine set to 90. you can also use the Select tool set to the polygon shape and click around the outside of the hair's outline. Even if you prefer to freehand erase the rest, the polygon shape tool is extremely useful for getting inside little cracks. Feel free to go section by section instead of doing it all in one go, that's what I do. Oh yeah, and make sure you have anti-aliasing turned on, that's important. It should probably be on be default, though.

For now, we're leaving her head and face intact, because it will help us fit it to the template. Set the opacity of the layer with your hair to be semi-transparent, and go to "Select > Transform". A linear transformation box will appear around the layer. Put it over the template hair, and scale and skew it to try and fit it to the template. Try to line up things like ears, eyes, and noses as best as you can, the hit "Ok".

Now you can repeat the same process you used on the hair to remove her face and any hair you want to put on the "Behind" layer. You'll want to duplicate the layer first to preserve the behind hair and come back to it later, for now we won't worry too much about it because it will clutter things too much. We're also removing the shadows the bangs cast on her face and the little strands of outline hair. We'll come back to those.

Already not looking too bad, you can already get a feel for what the hair is going to look like.

At this point, you might notice that the hair you picked doesn't look quite right, like that it doesn't fit the template very well, or that it will need to be cut up and adjusted a lot to look good. If that's the case, pivot from this tutorial to the redraw tutorial. Don't be afraid to switch from what you thought you would be doing if the hair you intended to crop will need work, or the hair you intended to redraw already looks pretty alright. These things can be hard to eyeball.

Now, duplicate the layer a few times, we're going to cut the hair into the bangs and under ear parts.

Hide those other layers, for now we're just going to work on the bangs and work out way back.

Now, I'm going to introduce you to your new best friend, Mesh transform. Make sure the layer you want to edit is your currently selected layer and go to "Select > Mesh transform". A transformation box with lots of different nodes will appear around the bangs. You can adjust how many nodes exactly with the column and row settings in the bottom right. But keep in mind that changing the row and column settings will reset any changes you already made. Right now, I'm just going to tuck in the side of her bangs so that a bit of her ear peaks through, like in the reference image. If something almost fits but not quite, try using mesh transform.

Now let's bring back our darker background and take a look at those outlines.

Yeah, they don't look so hot, right? They were kinda blurry in the source image, which means they lighten around the edges, which is going to look bad on darker backgrounds and if you zoom in. So I'll teach you how to fix that. And to do that, meet your other new best friend: clipping layers. Create a new layer above your bangs, and click the "Clipping" box on the right above your layers.

Now, colordrop a nice dark outline. As a little tip, you can colordrop at any time with any tool by right clicking. Switch to the brush tool and trace around the edge. It'll darken the edge of the outline without wrecking the transparency. If the line looks too thick, just switch back to the bangs layer and erase around the edges.

Here's a little before and after, I think you'll agree that it's a huge improvement.

And as a funny bonus, here's a look at what just the clipping layer looks like with clipping turned off. You'll notice that hairs like this one the gradate throughout the hair, you'll have to switch outline colors a few times.

Once that looks good, merge the clipping layer down so the improved bangs are one layer.

There are some parts of our hair we don't want, like the eyebrow and ear. We're going to have to draw over those to get rid of them. You can just freehand this part, it's not hard with little things like this eyebrow, but we could also using clipping layers again. Here, I use a placeholder color to draw over the area, then go over it with a clipping layer, trying to match it to the hair colors around it as best as I can. Again, if your hair sort of gradated like this one, the airbrush brush will help.

Now we can move on to our under ear layer.

The nice thing about the under ear part is that, since a static hair is, you know, static, you don't need to worry about anything that will be covered by the bangs. You just need to make sure that they join in a way that looks natural (this is why we do them together and separate them later, instead of separating them at the start, by the way). Our biggest issue right now is that. since we shrunk the bangs a bit, you can still see the old bangs as part of the under ear. The original ear as well. We'll use the same clipping layer technique here, too. It'll be a little harder just because it's a larger, more detailed area, but you can do it.

Once that's dealt with, we can repeat our steps for fixing the outlines on the under ear layer as well.

Your bangs and under ear should be looking nice now! That means we're ready to fix up the back layer now. Bring back the layer that still has the back hair and crop it to be just the hair, just like the others

Now, there obviously a lot that we'll need to redraw here. Can you guess how we're gonna do that?

Yeah.

I want to stress that you can absolutely just freehand these parts if you want to, but you're just looking to do a simple crop and edit, this method is fast and easy, and not likely to overwhelm you too much.

That's basically our hair! But there are a couple of extra things we can do to spruce it up a bit. For one thing, we can add back in the shadows we erased earlier. Redraw the shadows with a dark brown brush and lower the opacity until it looks right

Wen can also add back in the strands of hair we erased. drawing them back in freehand with the "Pen (Fade in/out)" brush looks way nicer than if we tried to crop them. Going over the bangs the cover her eye with a very low opacity soft eraser adds an anime touch. (Putting the eyebrow above the hair is handed by a mod)

Destribute the different segments of the hair to the different boxes, making sure they still line up properly. I do this by drawing one pixel lines were here chin and nose are, but there are probably better ways. Hide or delete anything you don't need, including the template itself. Put whatever you want in the bottom right, your signature, your reference images, an easter egg, a meme, as long as it's within that square, it won't show up in game. For fun, here's how it looks on the template:

The final step is to save it as a .png, make sure to give it a nice clear name so people can put it in their moreclothing easily without losing track of it, and test it in game to make sure it looks right. If everything looks right, grab some screenshots and post it to the RM!

And if you didn't already know and want it, you can download the hair made for this tutorial here.

 

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Part 3: Redrawing

If the hair you want to make wouldn't work as a simple crop and import, then you might want to try redrawing it. It'll take a bit more time and effort, but you can pretty much guarantee it will look good in-game and fit the template, since you'll have full control over it. The beginning steps are basically the same, we'll still need to get our reference image and cut it out.

This time, we're gonna get a bit more granular, cutting up the bangs into individual pieces, too.

This way we can easily make adjustments to individual pieces with tools like transform and mesh transform

Repeat the process with the under ear layer.

We don't have to worry much about little things like lines not lining up in our mockup, since we can draw them in a more sensible way when we get there. Not strictly necessary, but an easy way to get a good looking color pallet for SDT is to load up the game with a RGB adjustable hair, colordrop a good base and shading color from our reference image, and punch in the hex codes in-game.

No that we've got the general shape we want from our reference, we can begin redrawing. Here's a tip that can make this a lot easier for you: when you have your brush selected, you'll see this "snap" option at the top. select the curved line to easily create long and smooth lines. (The dot at the end is how you reset to create a new shape.)

As a tip, I find that varying between 1.5 and 3 brush width is good for lineart at this size. It can be a bit hard when the size of the art is this small, but try to keep line weighting in mind as best as you can, and don't make places with tiny details too cluttered. The fade in/out brush is your friend.

Get the lines and flats for the bangs down. This part is hard to word since it's basically just drawing, tracing, using your judgement when something doesn't look quite right in the mockup and redrawing it to look better. You don't need to do this part if you don't want to, but I use placeholder colors while drawing and only replace them with the final colors once I'm done.

Now we repeat that process with the under ear layer. We're still keeping our hair just the lines and flats for now, but we can just quickly draw her scrunchie since it's so simple.

Now, just like before with our crop, we have the basic shape of our hair down and we can bring back the behind layer without cluttering things too much.

Our behind layer here is just lines and shading, so it won't need any extra detailing. But with the rest of our hair, we can finally start adding our shading,

and highlights.

Once our placeholder colors look perfect, we can add our finalized colors. Color drop from the reference image and draw a sold box over the individual parts with clipping layers. This part will be especially easy if you keep your layers clean and uncluttered.

Just like before, now that our hair is pretty much finished, we can go through and add some slight adjustments. Softening around the eyes, and also adding some subtle gradients and shadows to it to better match the reference.

Now your hair is basically done! Once again, all that's left is to distribute the layers to the different template sections, save, and check your results in-game!

I hope these tutorials could help, even just a little. I know there are parts of this process I can't really tutorialize, since things like drawing to reshaping different parts are really the sort of thing you have to use your intuition for, and the sort of things you build up a sense for the more you do them. But if nothing else, I hope they can at least work as good jumping off points, and maybe teach you a few tricks. And once you get a good feel for this process, not only will making static hairs become easier for you, but those skills will carry over into any other mod you want to make. This process is exactly how I make reference images for vector mods I want to make. Consider each step more or less just iterating on the one before, making a redrawn hair is basically the same process as making a crop but with extra steps, and making a dynamic hair is basically the same process as making a redrawn hair but with extra steps. Maybe eventually, when I'm more confident in my dynamic hair workflow, I'll come back and add a tutorial for that, too. For now, though, if you just want to make a good looking static hair, I hope this tutorial serves you well.

And if you want it, the hair made here can be downloaded here.