Akuba's Salon - Black Hair for Conan Exiles Part 1

This will be a series of 10 hairs that I had the opportunity of being commissioned for by Terrornaut of the Deadlands server community. I created each hair in zbrush and authored APEX physics for each of the hairs. This hair mod is available on the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1938818750

There is an obvious demand for more representation of people of color in video games and in my research I found a lack of Afro-centric hair solutions in games to take inspiration from. So I had to get a little inventive in the creation of these 10 hairs. All the hairs were fitted for both sexes in the game and the APEX physics needed be applied twice for each hairstyle. As Conan Exiles still runs on Unreal Engine 4.15, we do not have access to the latest clothing solutions present in later versions, so APEX must be used.

This first entry features the voluminous curls. Texture was made in Zbrush with fibermesh and baked with xNormal. I was able to bypass Xgen with this workflow, but I'd still recommend another box modeler program like Maya for UV adjustment. After laying down the lower layers, I allowed myself to get a little crazy with the hair shapes; some twisting patterns and intense curling for the flyaways which are more often seen from the sides. I applied the curls into upper and lower layer sets to enhance volume, and used two invisible dome shaped planes to guide the hair physics.