A very old thread in the forums was revived, or bumped, by a couple of comments, and it reminded me of the holes in some of the how-to guides. There isn't much about hair making on the forums except what was posted to that thread.
Warning: before experimenting with any aspect of your appearance, save your appearance. Right click your avatar, choose appearance, then click the make outfit button at the bottom of the appearance menu. The clothes you are wearing, and any attachments, will already be checked. Click into the boxes for skin, hair, eyes, and shape, and then name the folder. I usually use something like "saving Cali 10.9.06" so that I can see which is my most up-to-date appearance.
Then, when you make new hair, especially if you change the texture, make sure you "save as" so that you do not overwrite your current hair and can revert to it if you need to. The confusing thing about hair, shape, skin, eyes, is that although you are "wearing" them, you can't take them off -- because you can't leave yourself with nothing in place. You have to replace the skin, eyes, hair, shape wih another in order to take off the one you are wearing.
It is all too easy to change the skin. hair, eyes. shape you are wearing, and be unable to revert as it is your only copy you are changing. You can easily make a copy of any copyable part of your appearance by right clicking on the item in your inventory, choosing copy, and then pasting it into a folder, by right clicking the folder and choosing "paste". Thus you can take a copy of your hair and keep it in case you mess up the one you are wearing.
There are two types of hair. The first is the Linden or "growing" hair which is on your head when you join SL. Ok, it isn't so natural. It does "grow" and you can change colour, length, cut by using the sliders in the appearance menu. What you may not realise is that you can change the texture too, by selecting a new texture to replace the default one. While in appearance, either drag a texture from your inventory to the window, or click on the hair texture window to replace the texture. You can find some textures for brightly coloured hair in one or two of the Avalon colour boxes. You can make your own hair texture using the SL templates available on the SL website, or Chip Midnight's fantastic templates available here. Or you can buy hair textures at some texture houses in SL.
The second type of hair is prim hair, as shown on my avatar in the picture. This is hair which is built out of primitives in the same way as a couch or a house. It often uses a tapered torus shape in quantity. New, flexible hair, uses the plain shapes which can be made flexible now.
If you want to make your own prim hair, I recommend that you find a free pose stand, and stand your avatar on it, to begin with. You will need to be able to manipulate small prims in order to make hair, and to be able to use your camera to move around your avatar using ALT and the arrow keys.
You may wish to make your avatar bald to make hair, as most prim hair sits best on a bald head. You may also want to make a cap out of half a sphere ... to enable you to use it as a base while you work on it away from the pose stand.
In making prim hair, it helps to have a reference photograph for the hair that you are trying to make, and to pre-make some prims for it too, making sets of longer or shorter prims, with flex and without. Then it is just a matter of trial and error.
From a large number of postings on the forums for design and textures, people don't understand how to make a flexi prim. You can only use a few shapes for flexi hair, box, cylinder and prism. Make the shape and size of prim you require, select and choose edit, and then click the feature tab on the edit menu. Click into the flexi box to check it and make the prim flexi. Bear in mind the rigid part it "hangs" from is at the bottom, so for hair to flop about it will need to be turned upside down. You will want to experiement with the settings: making gravity stronger will make it hang more, making gravity weaker will make it flop around more.
Try not to use too many torii, try to give the hair enough "body) -- the first newmaker error is to make it too flat against the head -- and if you find a good base, make sure you copy it, before you move on a make it into a distinctive style. Remember the limit for linking pieces together is 256 ... but don't be surprised if you get a "pieces too far apart" linking error when you try to link it. My advice if you do is to try linking it into two pieces and then into one.
When you have linked the hair, you need to place it on your head. Name it first: "hair triall v1" maybe. Right click and choose more and then attach, and then head, skull. The hair won't "know" why way up to be, or where exactly to place itself, and so you may have to edit it in place. Right click it and choose edit, and then manipulate it to where it should be. Once you have done this you should be able to right click, choose more, then wear, and the hair should go to the right place. Note that if you choose more, and then attach again, this will over-write the position you have stored, and start from scratch again.
Happy hair making :-).
