I haven't seen this discussed for a while - how to get your character wearing a hat plus a decent hair style. The problem, of course, is that the hair pokes through the hat. I experimented a little with this. Originally I thought that it ought to be possible to create a new polygon group in the hair, select the poking out polygons, and assign a transparent material. It didn't work, partly because the grouping tool isn't adequate for what becomes quite a delicate selection, partly because the polygons are then assigned to more than one material, which means they don't become transparent. There may be a way round that... but frankly, it isn't worth the effort.

Then I thought that rendering the hat alone and then the scene with everything but the hat would work, compositing the renders in Photoshop. The problem here is that you lose the shadows from the hat. In the end I tried magnets, and the results were quite good. Here's some examples with Jessi, the light edge bob hair, and the silly hat she comes with.

First, the raw render - note the hair sticking out of the hat; it would be almost impossible to fix this in postwork:

Then I added four magnets to the hair. The mag base and zone were moved into position then the magnet itself 'pushed' into the head, taking the hair with it:

This produces the following effect, sans hat:

It looks weird, but since you can't see the top of the head once the hat is on, it doesn't matter. Finally, add the hat and the result is:

I think this is quite a good result, and could probably be improved with tweaking. The trick is to scale and place the mag zones so that they don't affect (or only very slightly affect) the hair which will show.

Sorry if this is old hat (pun not intended!) but I thought some people might be interested.

Steve

Steve