Hi! I’m following a tutorial on converting hair from TS4 to TS3 (link), but I’m having trouble with the hair texture - it looks a bit messy and I’m not sure how to handle it.




To create the control map, I understand that I need to assign specific colors to different parts in order to use the 4 channels. However, in this case the texture is quite complex and I’m not sure how to approach it.

Is it possible to use just one color (one channel) for the whole hair? If so, which one would be the best to use? Or maybe you have any tips on how to create a control map for this kind of texture?

I’d really appreciate any help!

And for reference, this is the hair I’m trying to convert: link

The TS4 UV maps are a crime against 3D modelling, indeed.

You can use all black (this is the base colour of the hair on a control map) but you could also include green (highlights) - horizontal ones for the top-left, vertical for the rest as long as the direction of the parts remains consistent.
You can empty / blackout the channels for red and blue (roots and tips).

If you want to put in the extra effort to include all channels, in Blender you can select one of those areas, go to the UV editor, open the UV menu, and choose Export UV Layout. That will export those UVs as an image that you can overlay on your texture as a reference, and either paste in the red/blue from a template (like Anubis' control map) or I've also seen TS4 conversions simply use a large soft brush to paint the roots and tips so that they're more like an ombre.

Whichever you're comfortable with for your skill level, and whatever looks best for your preference

It takes a lot of time, but you can make streak hairs and ombres. In blender's edit mode, I select the strands I want to add color to, export their uv's, and then view it in a photo editor. Then I duplicate and resize a control map multiple times to fill in those uv's. To preview, I export my edited control map and apply it as a texture to the hair in blender.

Thank you so much for the advice, I really appreciate it! I ended up splitting it into two channels (black and green) using Levels in Photoshop. Did some gaussian blur. And it looks like that now:



Unfortunately, I’m not very happy with how the hair turned out overall - it ended up looking like a big, bulky block

But at least now I know that I can simplify things and use fewer channels in the future.

Thanks again for all your help!

That’s what the tutorial was suggesting too, but that hair is too complex for me to handle that way. It would take me forever to match these



Still, thank you so much for the tip - I really appreciate the help!

You may like the appearance more if you use the highlights from an existing template (the download attached to this post), as on EA hairs they are subtle streaks.
You would open that texture, fill the red and blue channels with black, and rotate it to match the direction
End result should look like this:

If you notice that any parts are oriented incorrectly (horizontal lines across the hair), you can select those areas and rotate them. Should be straightforward compared to roots/tips.

Or, you can even use a template that uses all channels as streak highlights.
I've uploaded one I've had for a while from the creator Littlecat, here. They used to make default retextures using this control, which uses every valid colour as highlights (including yellow and magenta, which appear in-game as a combination of channels).
That way, all channels are usable in-game with no extra work.

Just make sure to credit Anubis or Littlecat, if you use either

I think I might have just picked the wrong hair for this project overall (I’m aiming to recreate something similar to Karen’s hair from Stranger Things - wavy curly hair with bangs she had in season 5) I’m planning to try again with a couple of different ones, i found two that kinda match my vision: link and link

I’ll definitely try your method on the new ones though - they are less complex so I’ll test it out and see which approach works better. Also i am still learning and its a good practice

Thanks again for all the helpful tips!