How to make hair grey at the temples?

rained

I want to do hair that is greying at the temples like Marvel's Doctor Strange or Strickler from Trollhunters. Any suggestions on how to do this? I tried editing a hair texture but it looks like it applied if across all the strands instead of just in streaks. Any ideas? Do I need a certain kind of hair or shader? Maybe I'm just messing up the texture?

Sevrin

1. What you can do (easy way) is
2. Set up your scene, and make a render with dark hair.
3. Change the hair colour to a grey shade.
4. Select the Spot Render tool.  In the Tool Settings tab, select the New Window options.  If your Tool Settings window is not open, go to Window > Panes (Tabs) and select it from the list to open it.
5. Render the area with the hair to that new window.
6. Using an image editor that uses layers, i.e, The Gimp, PS, Affinity Photo, PaintShopPro, etc, blend the lighter hair into your image.

You can also (hard way) try with transmapped hair to

1. Make separate material zones for the areas you want grey
2. Apply a dark hair shader to the hair
3. Apply a grey hair shader to the temples

I would definitely go with the easy way, but you'll need some basic image editing skills. 

rained

Thank you, Sevrin! I hadn't thought of material zones. I've got plenty of image edting skills so I could honestly just do it in post if I wanted to, but I'd like to do a comic so I don't want to be adding the grey in post every single time the character appears if I don't have to. I'll try playing around with material zones, not sure how to make them blend nicely but maybe if the shader itself fades out somehow that would work.

Sevrin

rained said:

Thank you, Sevrin! I hadn't thought of material zones. I've got plenty of image edting skills so I could honestly just do it in post if I wanted to, but I'd like to do a comic so I don't want to be adding the grey in post every single time the character appears if I don't have to. I'll try playing around with material zones, not sure how to make them blend nicely but maybe if the shader itself fades out somehow that would work.

Chevybabe's Backlight Shaders would probably be a good choice.  You can play with cutout opacity to help with the blending.  It's not gonna be great with all hair items, but should work with some.

kaotkbliss

Another method could be to use geometry editor in daz studio to select the parts of the hair you want to make gray, then right click -> assign selected geometry -> create surface from selected

Then you can make a copy of the texture for the hair and in a photo editor change it to gray scale so it's black and white and use that as the diffuse image for your new surface area

RexRed

You can put two identical sets of the same hair  on them (or even different hair types), change one to gray and one to the other color you want and if the skull cap is fine enough you can use cutout and geometrey editor to delete and hide different parts each of the skull caps, blend them with meshgrabber.  

westcala

I find this quite effective, I used Vintage male Balding hair cap. WithTrevor Flipped hair.