Image Credit: Eric Meister – meistermash.tumblr.com

The beard. Often a defining feature on any face.

I want to take a minute to make sure your character isn’t missing out on an opportunity to show off his (or her?) killer facial hair. In the video below, I cover how to add a beard to your character. But even more than that, this beard has the potential to make you pull your own beard out. The situation is, you have a beard where part needs to follow the face. While another part of this fuzzy face friend needs to be controlled by you.

Tip 1: You’ll need to make two beards. Name one Beard_Result and the other Beard_Skinned, if you like. We’ll be making a beard chain…if that’s a thing. This chain will work like this: Beard Joints and Controls > > Beard_Skinned >> Beard_result.

Tip 2: Setup Beard_Skinned like you would any skinned geo. It’s going to be an independent rig that’s fed into your Beard_Result with a blendshape. (Cool stuff!)

Tip 3: Make sure that you setup the blendshape into Beard_Result before you setup the wrap deformer. This order of inputs is critical. Once that is done, simple select your Beard_Result and the characters face, and go to Deformers > Wrap.

Tip 4: Try not to make too complex of a beard. Things can get dicey if you’re going to make this thing drop to your guy’s belt line. For a case like that, you’ll want to build some kind of franken-beard.

Watch the video!

Don’t have a special someone to put your new beard skills to use? Grab Craig today!