In order to isolate the scalp even more, you can paint out an attribute where you want to generate curves and then override the density with that attribute in the guide groom sop. However, I didn't want to place guides on the entire mesh because some of the guides ended up inside her head or too far down her forehead. Love it or hate it, Maya’s xGen is still a great way to create, manage and groom hair. You can also use spline curves to create grass, ropes, and other objects for landscapes. Sayed Mahmood Amery covers the basics for working with xGen and creates stylized hair. Now select the character mesh and go to nHair>Create Hair>Option box. This will assign a new hair system along our guides, so that when we add the hair it will get placed where the guides are located.
For example, use spline curves for long or short hair, eyebrows, mustaches, and beards. Select all the curves you created and go to nHair>Assign Hair System>New Hair System. Learn how to create hairstyling in Ornatrix For Maya with this free video tutorial, by starting with very basic hair shapes and then create tied bun. By then converting it back into polygons, I was able to get a much higher resolution mesh. Create hair or fur using spline primitives Create all styles of hair and fur by instancing spline primitives on your character mesh. After creating my selection, I extruded it for thickness and ran a vdb from polygons to convert it to voxels. I used a blast node to remove everything but the scalp by simply selecting the faces that I wanted. When I imported the model into Houdini, there were some changes that I needed to make to isolate the scalp and also maintain the accuracy of the collisions. I then sculpted on top of the hand for details. I posed it to match the depressions in the face and imported it into Sculptris. Sculptris does a great job of making major changes to the model without needing to subdivide the entire mesh.
The ability to push and pull the model organically was necessary to create the lips and depressions in the face. Sculptris was my software of choice for modeling this project.