Hi. Making a proper beginner-oriented start-to-finish tutorial on this topic would take a long time and a lot of effort, so exploring the existing choices is the best option. There are some tutorials that cover the subject but, judging by the results of the people who followed them and came seeking help here after, they will most likely not answer your questions.
Your mesh looks very high poly and detailed, not a good choice for the beginner. In those situation the most reasonable thing to do is to retopologize it manually and then bake textures from high poly to low poly. That is how maxis does it. This process is not hard on itself but can be challenging in your case because of all of the strands.
I would advice you to postpone finishing this project and create a simpler hair (without curves) by following a non-curve relate tutorial for the sake of learning first, so that you would get the adapting process right. Then you can come back to this hair with a better idea of what to do
As for this hair, you have 2 options:
- reduce the polycount of every curve
like this (quoted text only), make sure to create uvs, then convert to mesh, and join into one. This will result in a mesh that is still unnecessary high poly and does not look very smooth, but at least you will be able to get it in the game;
- you can watch a tutorial on retopology with Bsurface addon, maybe you'll find some better options (just don't buy anything). I do not advice to use any automatic retopology tools because they will not give you any good results, they work well only with manifold geometry
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I had selected to reduce the poly count but I don't think it did it, by my error. I did convert it to mesh and join it and it was uneditable, I was only able to move it to fit the head in sculpt mode. It either selects all or nothing. Converting to UV basically made it look like spaghetti on the texture lmao. I see a bunch of frankenbuilds and speedbuilds that aren't really what I'm going for. The rest is something I could figure out in between. Thanks for the help, I'll look into doing more of that until I get workflow down.
