Polygon Hair Modelling

 I did not look into hair design very much, however I did not want my characters to be bald. I wanted to add a degree of personality to my characters, and hair is a good way of showing that.
In many western shooters, characters often had bald or short hair to fit into that "Military" look. However, my group didn't fall under the conventional "Military" archetype, despite being designed as a shooter. They act more as a group of high tech maintenance workers, rather than soldiers. Militray hairstyles are short, not only because they don't get in the way, but to make a unit look uniform which takes away from a characters individuality.

Main character from Spec Ops : The Line 

Without distinct facial features, it would be difficult to identify a character's head without facial hair or tattoos  I wanted some degree of individuality within my characters so I decided to give them basic hair. On the other side of things, incredibly expressive hair much like a lot of Japanese game characters, in most cases may make my characters seem too individual, giving the vibe that they do not work well in a team.

I aimed for something fairly contemporary to suit the working environment.

I've been using this tutorial to try and learn how to generate low poly hair for a game environment using alpha
maps.
http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html

I've never modelled polygon hair before, and I have always been put off by experimenting with alpha maps, so I ended up leaving this till last when I probably should have tackled this earlier. I attempted to do quick hair models and alphas in Maya which turned out alright, but the problems occurred when I attempted bring the final hair model into Marmoset. It was problematic trying to get the alphas working properly on the character.

After much troubleshooting, unfortunately I found out that alphas don't work too well in Marmoset. I had to use aplha testing as I couldn't get the alpha blend mode to work properly, which lead to choppy aplhas on the hair. 

End result of adding the hair in Marmoset.