Hair modeling tips for Blender

I have recently been doing hair renders in Blender and thought I would share some key tips that I have learned along the way:

  1. Use multiple particle systems. If you put all your hair in just one particle system, it becomes really tedious to edit the hair. You’ll end up combing hair that you didn’t mean to etc.
  2. Place the hair manually in hair edit mode (with the add hair brush). So set the initial amount to zero in the particle settings. Comb after every round of hair.
  3. Use simple children instead of interpolated, they are much easier to handle in the edit mode.
  4. To make the interpolated children more fluffy, increase the “radius” value.
  5. Be careful with the Path –> steps value, large values made my Blender crash.
  6. Use the Hair BSDF if you are rendering with Cycles. As of now that won’t work for Eevee so you’ll need to create your own shader for Eevee.
  7. Subdivide the roots of your hair in edit mode, because the hair needs more bend right where it comes out from the head. Also use enough keys when creating the hair strands.

Dealing with a multiresolution .mov file

For the first time in my career I encountered a video file that had two different resolutions. The beginning of the video was SD resolution and after 15 frames it jumped to a resolution of 1080p. VLC player was able to correctly switch the resolution during playback and it displayed the two different resolutions also in the codec information window. But Premiere Pro didn’t understand the file properly and never switched to the higher resolution portion of it. That was a problem because I wanted to use the high resolution in my edit.

Continue reading “Dealing with a multiresolution .mov file”

Unable to enter your WordPress password when trying to log-in? Here is an easy solution.

I recently encountered a problem in which it was impossible to login to the WordPress backend/admin area since the password field was not accepting any input. The same problem occurred on all the browsers I tested it in. It seems like an update might have broken something in a theme or a plugin. Finally there was an easy solution to the problem:

Just open the developer tools of your browser, target the password input field and delete the bit where it says “disabled” from the source code (displayed typically on the right side of you browser window in the Developer tools panel). Now the form field takes input again and you are able to login and update your plugins/theme if needed.