Hair re-revisited

So if you've been following me since about January, you'll know that I've been wrestling with making hair for a long while now. I failed with both making Alpha & Clay hair so I took a break. Starting up again, I found a new method using Blender instead of 3Ds Max which I (for the life of me) cannot wrap my head around. I've been bouncing from alternative but I think I might've struck gold. 

Turns out it's possible to make the mold-able planes I need using circle & path curves. This tutorial here shows you how and in 6 minutes.

Using the circle curve to make the planes that the image will lay on, I can essentially make hair how anyone else would in 3Ds Max but with Blender, a program I'm far more comfortable with.

Now I know what you're thinking, I've tried Alpha hair before and I'll probably only get those little triangles like I did before! And well...I did. I took another break for about a day to continue working on my monthly gift then came back. Looking up a few tutorials on Sims 4 studio, I found that I had to separate the planes in the order that they should show in game. From back to front, bottom to top, sorta like sewing hair tracks on a wig. This tutorial was from 3Ds Max but thankfully a person was kind enough to translate it into Blender Terms:

Select a plane in edit mode by pressing the L button and separating by selection using P. When all the planes are separated, select the planes from the highest number to the lowest and combine them. 

Then I needed to switch the planes from Quads to Tris which was easy enough using the triangulate modifier in Blender 2.82. After that, I had to flip normals as well in Milkshape but I assume that I can do that too in Blender as normal.

After that, I prep it and import it into sims 4 studio and get this result:

And open it in game with this result:

It's not perfect but it sure is alot better than when I started. 

Anyway, I just wanted to document this for myself in case I take a break then come back and forget everything. Also for anyone who might be struggling like I was for a long while. 

Thanks for reading though!