Hi all,

I am so in love with the hair function in Carrara. I mostly work with content and especially Victoria 4 so the ability to make realistic hair is highly important to me.

I think I know my way around in the hair room pretty well, I know how to use the tools and stuff. But what usually works best for me is to simply drape the hair and leave it the way it comes out on the character. Long hair that just falls naturally over Vicky's shoulders is unbeatable.

But now I'm curious of how to make a pony tail, or even piggy tails. The latter one sounds twice as complicated so I'd be happy to just fix a pony tail for now. Does anyone have any good ideas or suggestion how to fix anything tail like with hair? I tried to manually brush a hairdo into a ponytail. It took me an hour and it still didn't look very natural the way draped hair do. I wish there would be a feature to brush the hair backwards and then drape just the tail part.

You need to work in groups, maybe this way you can create the tail...

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I've not worked with hair at all yet in Carrara, but one option might be to have the hair grow from the scalp area toward a pony tail holder, which would be a modeled prop. Then have a second hair set growing from the pony tail holder out. Might be easier to get the look you want that way, instead of trying to make one set of hair go in all those directions.

Quote - I've not worked with hair at all yet in Carrara, but one option might be to have the hair grow from the scalp area toward a pony tail holder, which would be a modeled prop. Then have a second hair set growing from the pony tail holder out. Might be easier to get the look you want that way, instead of trying to make one set of hair go in all those directions.

Oh, I guess that technique was too obvious for me to figure out by myself. Of couse, that's it! Actually, a hair prop holder would also hide the gap between the two hair groups so it would look kind of real too. Thank you!

Cool, I hope it works out well. I'd love to see a render, to see how it does.

The way I did this was by creating an animation and having an oversized torus behind the head, brushing the hair through the torus and the shrinking the torus to the required size. It is a matter of timing it right to get the hair through the torus without it spilling everywhere. You might need to move the torus in the animation. Since I also wanted to suggest some movement it did take a couple of tries to get it the way I wanted it and it did look right although the parameters had nonsense values (and indeed hair would really never behave like that anyway) but it did look right.
I did experiment with a separate object to grow hair for the ponytail but the rest of the hair didn't look right.
As always there isn't just one solution. It all depends on your shot and your expectations.