Short hair WIP

Hello everyone,

I would love to hear your thoughts on a short-haired version of Tifa. I came across a mod that used this style and thought it suited her surprisingly well. I found that the long hair is just very difficult to work with sometimes from my previous animations, so I wanted to experiment with an alternative.

This is my third attempt at creating the hairstyle with hair particles. Each version took many hours, but this one feels like the most polished so far. I think one more redo might actually turn out worse, so I will focus on cleaning this version up a bit more and then it should be ready to use. As with anything, it is a skill I continue to learn. I do not have real knowledge of how hair behaves, so from a professional standpoint it might be approached in a wrong way, but I did my best to model it based on the mod and various reference screenshots. I might not even use it at all, the final render setup will always give a different perspective.

You may also notice that the model itself looks slightly different. My first two attempts were done on the previous model (which is a great model), but I realized the head shape was not quite the same as the one from the Final Fantasy Remake screenshots. I am not sure how many official Tifa head models exist, but the model by @Mustard has the shape I was aiming for. It is more compact, a bit cuter, and looks identical to the in-game screenshots.

I am also feeling motivated to finally start creating my own models. I always feel a little lazy relying so much on work made by others, even if they created it with sharing in mind, so this is probably just something personal I want to overcome. The part that intimidates me the most is rigging, but I think it might be time to give it a try and let it be a slow, steady process rather than something stressful or overly time consuming.