Hair Journey: Part I've lost count

Okay, so I'm back on my bullish again, trying to tackle hair. I took a break and yesterday, I had to power through some annoying vertigo to get it done! I'm honestly happy that I did because I think I'm on the cusp of greatness!

Okay so I detailed my process of making hair in Blender but this time I went back to 3Ds Max and I have to admit that maybe I was too in my feels giving it a bad name. I was just excited at the prospect of being able to make alpha hair in a program I know, haha. Anyway, I went back and textured the planes for my hair which was a pain in the butt becasue I didn't have an option ticked to display the texture:

It hadn't given me this problem before but things change I guess. If anyone is having trouble the same way I did, there's the picture if you need it!

Moving on, I make the hair, blah, blah, blah. I only do half becasue I want to test it right away. Instead of ordering the planes in 3Ds Max to fix the transparency issues I was having, I saw someone suggesting to instead, use Milk Shape for transparency stuff! 

Oh baby, I can't begin to tell you the memories I have working in Milk Shape when I was like 7 or 8, trying to make meshes for the Sims 2. Good times!

Anyway, I find that the process is about the same for Blender and 3Ds max. I have to order the planes from biggest to smallest and combine them but in Milk Shape I can see what is clipping over what and move them in the appropriate order they need to be in. 

Thanks to this handy tutorial that was originally for the Sims 3.

It's essentially the same but the post directing me there noted that the only differences were making sure 'Draw Backfaces" was off and that "Transparency" is set to "Simple". After assigning the texture to the mesh so you can see what you're doing of course.

So I imported all my planes which I exported from 3Ds Max, numbered appropriately:

And Import them into milk shape. With it, I ordered them, watching to make sure that those dreaded problems I had before wouldn't come up again.

Thank goodness they were easy to spot. It was like my eyes were playing tricks on me at first but blinking a few times, corrected my brain, haha! 

So I added backfaces for the hair so when you panned the camera around, there wouldn't be the void of nothingness in game and this is my end result:

Aside from a few texture issues that I won't deal with until later...along with a little bit of clipping at the top....I'd say....this was a success!

I was pretty happy with my work yesterday and promptly went to bed becasue I was sleepy! Anyway, this is what I have and I might continue either today or later during the week but the future in making Alpha hair is bright for me!

Thank you for reading!