AAA Salon – Game Hair Creation by Ashley Sparling

This course breaks down a straightforward, repeatable method for creating game-ready hair that holds up in both personal projects and a professional studio pipeline. You’ll learn how traditional wig-making techniques translate directly into a digital workflow, using XGen and Fibermesh to build believable hair textures and placement. No guesswork, no magic — just a solid process you can rely on.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Use next-gen pipelines to create real-time hair for games
• Confidently work with Fibermesh to generate realistic hair textures
• Navigate XGen in Maya for precise hair card placement
• Set up hair for lighting and rendering in Marmoset Toolbag
• Create animal fur for games using a full werewolf bonus pipeline
• Apply the Wig Technique theory to create any hairstyle from scratch

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Beginner-level knowledge of ZBrush, Maya, and Photoshop
• Tools: Graphics tablet, Photoshop, Substance Painter
• Hardware: Minimum 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU

📝 Description

The core idea here is simple: treat hair like a real wig. By studying how physical wigs are constructed — the cap, the layers, the flow — you get a mental model that makes digital hair far less chaotic. The course walks you through building a wig template in ZBrush, then translating that into a clean XGen setup in Maya with layered hair cards, flyaways, and blend cards.

What sets this apart is the attention to the full pipeline. It’s not just about placing cards and hoping for the best. You’ll cover texture creation in Substance Painter, flow maps, and final presentation in Marmoset Toolbag. The bonus module on creating a werewolf adds over an hour and a half of extra content, showing you how the same principles apply to animal fur — a skill that’s surprisingly rare in game art tutorials.

The teaching style is direct and practical. Each module ends with homework so you’re not just watching — you’re building. By the end, you’ll have a complete hair setup for a character, plus the knowledge to adapt the wig technique to any hairstyle you can imagine.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Character artists struggling to get that clean, AAA-quality hair look
• Game artists who want a repeatable pipeline for hair and fur
• Students with basic ZBrush and Maya knowledge looking to specialize in character grooming

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Ashley Sparling is a professional character artist with years of experience in the games industry. Her work focuses on creating production-ready hair and fur for AAA titles, and she’s known for breaking down complex grooming workflows into digestible, practical steps. She’s passionate about helping artists level up their portfolio pieces with techniques that actually work in a studio environment.

🏁 Final Result

• A complete, game-ready hair setup for a character, including hair cards, hair cap, and groomed textures
• A rendered presentation in Marmoset Toolbag showcasing your work
• A werewolf fur groom from the bonus module — a standout piece for any character art portfolio

📢 Guys, this is a Group Buy campaign, check the GBC forum thread to get access

You can find the course preview in the download section below.