I haven’t really read what anyone else posted besides the dev, I checked out everyone’s art though and they’re pretty good. I understand the idea behind poly count and that the best way to go about this is flatter shapes. Here’s my random two ideas for long “hair”.
I live in Florida, so naturally I thought about palm trees/coconut trees, but a more swampy/leathery/glossy leaf/floppy leaf is needed for the weight natural long hair gives. So, something like this http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3233/3035362246_60fbb6aa70_o.jpg in palm tree form would look like the top drawing. I added a coconut, but literally any round shape in that spot would replace the concept of a hair ribbon on females in real life.
The second one, I thought about Canadian “fan-service” and the draconic helm. http://i.imgur.com/gV1HX.png Not looking to replace the helmet. I demonstrated this one horribly, but looking at “A.” I put on the drawing, aka the back of the hair, I wanted to replicated the draconic leggings cloth part, for “B.”, I was thinking of the little maple leaves acting as spikey side burns as side burns are the most interesting aspect in a hair style.
I feel the most important think in a sylvari hairstyle is giving volume either in width, or height. I feel the most chosen hairstyles in the game are the ones that don’t have symmetry though. I like Murke’s dreadlocks, The male sylvari in the intro CS, and the picture Kiayin took of a root comb over, but less length cut off at the shoulder ends. With my drawings, I’m not expecting them to be any good, I just think everyone’s looking more at turning human hair into sylvari hair, I feel people are confusing them with elves, or pokemon when they start trying to put a whole tree on their head and I feel we should focus more on leaf types, shapes, weight, and texture. The tricky part is making this leaves/thick objects replicate hair, but don’t look at it as hair, I would go buy a small plastic or styrofoam head, go out and get different leaves and glue them to the head in different ways.
