HOW DO I MAKE BRAIDED HAIR IN BLENDER?

Getting hair right is tricky, and the challenge becomes even greater when that hair needs to be animated

- Helen James

Hair grooming tools in the likes of Houdini have become so advanced that the only limit seems to be an artist's abilities. Blender contains an improving set of grooming functionality as well, but as the question focuses on braids we'll take a more specific approach.

To help answer this one I'm indebted to Nino (AKA DefoQ) for Braidify, a free tool developed alongside some incredibly helpful training videos. The first iteration was impressive, great for creating braids and animating them, but was highly processor intensive. Making changes to the output was, at times, rather slow and sucked some of the life out of the creative process. Nino listened to artist's feedback and introduced a second, far quicker and more responsive iteration. It integrates well into Blender's existing tools, but isn't quite as effective at animating braids.

Braids are a complex structure formed by the interlacing of three or more strands of material. We see this most often in hair, but any type of flexible material can be braided, including textiles and wire. Re-creating braids in 3D without the help of a plugin would be tedious and cumbersome, with each strand needing to be created individually before interlacing them. This leaves the potential for clashing high, with an additional challenge around making any changes to the braid paths.