Breakdown: How to Create a Real-Time Hair Inspired by Marilyn Monroe

Introduction

I'm Manish Dubey AKA Darth_Playtpus. I'm a Real-Time Hair Artist specializing in creating hair and fur for games. My journey into 3D art began in 2019 when I took a 3D art course to learn about how characters in games and animation achieve such a believable look. I started by experimenting with modeling and texturing, and over time, I naturally gravitated toward hair, as I found it to be one of the elements that can truly define a character's personality and presence.

I did not understand hair when I first started making them, and struggled a lot, but over time, with persistence, and with some push from my peers, I came to understand a lot about real-time hair and grooms. Most of my skills come from a combination of hands-on production experience, self-driven learning, and constant iteration. Working in real production environments taught me not only the artistic side of hair creation but also the technical realities of real-time pipelines such as performance budgets, shader limitations, and engine integration.

Some of the projects I've contributed to include Hunt: Showdown, Call of Duty, and other unannounced titles. From 2022 to April 2025, I worked as a Real Time Hair Specialist, where I was responsible for creating hair assets optimized for real-time characters and collaborating closely with character artists and technical teams to ensure both visual fidelity and performance.

Marilyn Monroe-Inspired Hair

Most of the hairstyles I create for my portfolio usually start during the research phase of my personal projects. When I'm collecting references, if something visually clicks with me, I naturally feel the urge to break it down and study it more deeply. While researching for another piece, I came across an old movie poster that immediately caught my attention.

I started analyzing the hairstyle and found the flow, shape, silhouette, and clumping patterns particularly interesting, which motivated me to gather more references and move forward with it as a dedicated project. In my personal work, I always try to maintain a sense of artistic freedom, experimenting with flow and shapes to make a hairstyle more visually appealing while still preserving the essence and recognizable characteristics of the original look.

One of the most challenging aspects of creating any hairstyle is combining information from different angles into a single, cohesive form that feels natural and flows well in 3D. Deciding which shapes to prioritize is a really interesting part of the process, and being able to visualize the hairstyle clearly in your mind goes a long way. It makes the later stages, like grooming and card placement, much more intuitive and controlled.

My main focus when creating AAA real-time hair is to make it feel as realistic as possible. To achieve that, I rely on a combination of techniques I've developed and refined over time as a real-time hair artist, constantly iterating to balance visual fidelity with performance.

Workflow

My workflow is divided into multiple stages. The first step is gathering references and doing a thorough breakdown of them. I analyze the flow, overall shape, clumping patterns, and volume distribution. This stage is all about understanding the structure of the hairstyle before touching any tools, because having a clear mental map makes the rest of the process much more intentional and efficient.

The second stage is the Sculpt Pass, where I create a simplified sculpted version of the hairstyle in ZBrush. The goal here is to translate the reference breakdown into a tangible form and visualize the hair in 3D space. It helps me make decisions about flow, volume, silhouette, and plane shifts before moving into the more technical stages.

I usually rely on brushes like Curve Tube Snap to establish primary strands, the Move brush to refine flow and adjust volumes, and Clay Buildup to define masses and transitions. A strong sculpt pass acts as a blueprint. It makes card placement more intentional and also guides texture creation later, since the major forms and direction are already clearly defined.

Texture

Moving on to the third stage, which is texture creation. For this part of the process, I typically use either XGen or FiberShop, depending on the needs of the project for this hairstyle. I chose XGen because it gave me the level of control I needed for strand flow and breakup.

Before creating an XGen description, I always make sure the project is properly set in Maya. Setting the project early helps avoid issues like missing paths, misplaced Texture Maps, or unexpected crashes later in the process, which can save a lot of time.

Some of the parameters and modifiers I typically use in my XGen setup help introduce variation and natural breakup in the texture, which is essential for avoiding repetition and achieving a more believable result.

For rendering Texture Maps such as AO, Root-to-Tip, Flow, and ID, I use Arnold directly inside Maya rather than baking them externally in tools like Substance or XNormal. Keeping the process within Maya helps maintain consistency with the groom and gives me more control over the output.

To render these maps, I first set up the necessary AOVs in Maya. For the AO map, I use the aiAmbient Occlusion shader to capture soft contact and depth information. For ID and Flow maps, I use an aiUtility shader with specific color and shading settings depending on the map I'm generating. This setup allows me to output clean, controlled passes that are ready for use during texturing and shader setup

For the Depth map, I usually position the camera closer to the groom to capture a stronger depth range. Then, I adjust the brightness and contrast in the display settings to fine-tune the values and get the desired gradient. This approach gives me a quick and controllable depth pass that works well for texturing and additional breakup. For additional maps like Roughness, Specular, Gloss, and Albedo, I paint them manually in Photoshop, as it gives me more control.

Now comes the main and fourth stage, which is card placement. My primary software for placing hair cards is ZBrush, as it gives me a lot of artistic freedom to adjust flow, layering, and silhouette intuitively while staying close to the sculpt.

First, I place my base layer depending on my hair. Sometimes the base layer needs to cover the whole head so no scalp is visible, but for this, I felt there was no need for that because the hair is fluffy in volume, and I could easily fix that with my primary layer. Moving to the primary layer is where I finalize the volume and main flow of hair.

This is where you want to spend most of the time. As the name suggests breakage layer is used for breaking the flow. It also serves another function, which is blending negative spaces and hiding the sharp edges of the primary layer cards. Once that is done, I move to transitions and flyaways, which adds more natural look.

And finally, I always prefer to work on the hairline and parting separately from the other layer cause these areas require your utmost attention. The more refined these areas are more natural your hair feels, so you might want to take your time adding those tiny details here.

Alternatively, I also use GS Curve Tools in combination with NoBrain's Groomer Tool when I want to do placement in Maya. This combination is especially useful for me because it allows me to mimic the brush feel I get in ZBrush in Maya. There are several tools in Groomer that are especially helpful when working with curves in Maya.

The Interactive Curve window provides options like Sculpt, Add, Cut, and Draw, which make it easy to tweak and refine curves after attaching cards using GS Curve Tools. This allows for quick iteration on flow and spacing without breaking the overall structure. Another feature I rely on is Extract Curve, which lets me generate curves directly from my sculpt pass.

This is extremely useful because it preserves the original flow and design intent from the sculpt, making the card placement process faster and more consistent. Once I have started placement, I set up my render engine so I can view how the placement looks simultaneously while working. I use either Marmoset Toolbag or Unreal Engine for this project. I used both and tried matching both shaders as closely as possible 

Lastly, once the placement is complete, I move on to the optimization stage. This involves eliminating intersections between cards, cleaning up the mesh, and refining the geometry so everything reads smoothly from different angles. I also add supporting edges where needed to improve curvature and shading, ensuring the cards deform and catch light more naturally while still staying within performance budgets.

Rendering and Lighting

For lighting and rendering, I used Unreal Engine 5 and Marmoset Toolbag 4. I aimed to keep the lighting setup and shader response as consistent as possible between both, so the hair would maintain a similar look in different rendering environments. Matching the overall intensity, color temperature, and specular behavior helped ensure the presentation stayed cohesive and true to the intended material definition.

In Marmoset, I place lights manually and adjust intensity, distance, and other parameters, and once I'm confident that the setup works, I move to tweaking some render settings like Sharpness, bloom, AO, etc. Tweaking these makes your work come alive more.

For Unreal Engine, I use the MetaHuman lighting setup as a base and tweak it further for this project, as I mentioned. I wanted to keep it similar in both setups, so I adjusted the light according to my marmoset setup so I could achieve similar lighting. Once I was done with lighting, I moved to tweak post processing setting a bit to make it pop more in Unreal Engine.

Conclusion

Every project I do, my main goal is to learn something new from that and improve my quality and work more than in my previous projects. I started this project in January. But I was also not working daily, but usually it takes me around 13 to 15 days to complete a hair in a production pipeline.

For anyone who wants to try making hair, my suggestion would be do a lot of back and forth between your placement and texture passes, as every time you make a change in textures, it makes a lot of difference in your hair. Any of my previously described stages is never set in stone, even after making a sculpt, I might take a totally different direction in some areas later because I found some more interesting reference of same hair.

Lighting and shading play a crucial role in how hair ultimately reads. You can apply all the right placement techniques, but without a well-tuned shader and thoughtful lighting, the result can still feel flat. Taking the time to refine specular response, contrast, and light direction makes a huge difference in bringing depth and life to the hair. I hope this article gives you a clearer understanding of real-time hair. If you enjoyed the breakdown, feel free to check out more of my work on ArtStation. You can also check my LinkedIn.

Darth_Platypus, 3D Character, Hair and Groom Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins