3D Hair Specialist — Freelance

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR We are looking for a Blender specialist with hair grooming expertise to help us build the hair visualisation layer of this pipeline. This is a commission-based engagement, not a salaried role. Our primary requirement is a Hair Grooming Specialist — someone who understands both the technical shader physics of hair in Blender and the artistic craft of making hair look natural and cohesive. If you also have general Blender skills covering scan cleanup, sculpting, and texture painting, that is a strong bonus and we will consider a broader engagement scope. But the grooming expertise is the non-negotiable part. If you can cover both the hair grooming commission AND the generalist scan processing tasks described later in this brief — we want to hear from you. This would be a larger and longer engagement. Most patients coming to us for hair transplant planning are not fully bald. They have: • A thinning or absent recipient zone — where grafts will be placed • Surrounding native hair — existing, longer, styled hair already present The visualisation we show patients must demonstrate what their scalp will look like after the transplanted hair grows in and integrates with their existing surrounding hair. The result must read as a single natural hairstyle — not as a hair system dropped onto a bald patch. A previous candidate produced results that looked like a wig placed on the scalp — because they built hair from scratch with no understanding of how transplanted hair integrates with surrounding native hair, and no knowledge of the Principled Hair BSDF shader. That is exactly what this commission is designed to solve. PRIMARY ROLE — HAIR GROOMING SPECIALIST A library of pre-built, reusable hair strand presets and a locked Blender template file. Once delivered, this library is used by our in-house team for every patient scan we process. Your work is done once and applied hundreds of times. Strand Presets — Minimum 2, Target 4–6 Preset A — Straight / Slightly Wavy. For the Indian patient majority. Fine-to-medium shaft, front-to-back growth, natural curvature variance, no artificial uniformity. Preset B — Coiled / Tightly Curled. For patients of African or Middle Eastern descent. Correct curl radius and pitch, shaft-level natural variance, accurate growth arc from scalp surface. Additional presets for Phase 2: medium-wavy, grey/salt-and-pepper, fine/low-density variants. Each preset must: • Use Blender Hair Curves (3.3+) — not legacy particle hair • Use Principled Hair BSDF shader with correct Melanin concentration and Melanin redness — not a generic Principled BSDF with tinted Base Color • Include correctly tuned shaft-level randomness — kink, curvature and length variance — no synthetic uniformity • Include a macro combing direction control adjustable per patient without re-grooming the full preset • Be delivered as saved Blender assets for one-click appending If your approach to hair colour matching involves adjusting the Base Color of a Principled BSDF rather than Melanin parameters — this commission is not the right fit. The Blending Requirement In our 3D scan files, the patient's surrounding native hair appears as photographic texture on the mesh — not as geometry. The transplanted zone is represented by a hair curves system. Your presets must be designed so that at the zone boundary, the hair system continues into and reads as part of the surrounding texture — no hard edge, no colour discontinuity, no visible seam. The combing direction at the boundary must follow the flow visible in the surrounding texture photograph. Reference-Based Design We hold pre- and post-procedure photographs of our real patients at 6 and 12 months post-transplant. You will be given a curated reference set at onboarding. Your presets must be built against these references — accuracy to real clinical outcomes, not personal stylistic interpretation. The Locked Template File You will also deliver a locked Blender template containing: • Correct OBJ scan import material setup — Principled BSDF, Base Color to texture, Blend Mode Opaque • Pre-built Geometry Nodes group distributing graft markers at a density entered as a single number — no node editing by operator • Render configuration: 1920x1080, 64-128 samples • Basic lighting, pre-appended hair assets, clear layer structure for non-technical operators ALTERNATIVE APPROACH — FULL WIG / HAIRSTYLE METHOD This is not our primary aim — but we are open to exploring it if you have strong capability in this area. If you specialise in this method, please tell us. Our preferred approach is placing individual transplanted hair strands into the recipient zone using Hair Curves, blending them into the patient's existing surrounding hair. However, we recognise that an alternative method exists — building a complete hairstyle system that covers the full scalp as a unified wig-style hair object, rather than treating the transplanted zone as a separate inserted element. What this alternative would involve: • Full scalp hair system — a complete hair curves or particle system covering the entire scalp, both existing hair areas and the transplanted zone, as one unified object • Matched to patient's existing hair — the full system must be styled and coloured to match what the scanner captured of the patient's surrounding native hair, so the result reads as a continuation of their real hair • Principled Hair BSDF shading throughout — the same shader requirements apply; physically accurate colour via Melanin parameters, not Base Color tinting • Zone density variation — the transplanted zone area must show the correct planned graft density while the surrounding areas reflect the patient's existing natural density • Hairstyle accuracy — the overall style, parting, combing direction, and hair length must be adjustable to match the patient's preferred style The advantage of this method is that the blending problem at the zone boundary is eliminated — there is no seam because the entire head is one system. The challenge is that it requires more per-patient grooming work and may not be as fast to apply as a zone-insert preset. If you work primarily in this full-scalp method and have strong results to show, we will evaluate it alongside our primary approach. Include examples in your application. BONUS — BLENDER GENERALIST SCAN PROCESSING This is not a separate hire. If you already have these skills alongside your grooming expertise, it makes you significantly more valuable to us and we will structure the engagement accordingly. In addition to the grooming commission, our pipeline requires per-patient scan processing in Blender. This is repetitive, defined work — not creative. The tasks are: • Hole filling in Edit Mode — identifying mesh gaps in the recipient zone, selecting boundary edge loops, filling with F key or Grid Fill • Hair flattening in Sculpt Mode — using the Flatten brush to level hair geometry spikes at the recipient zone boundary; Smooth brush to blend. These two brushes only. • Texture painting — Clone brush to replace dark hair texture in flattened areas with skin tone; Blur brush to blend edges • Geometry nodes input — entering the grafts per cm² value into the pre-built node group and applying the correct hair preset Per-patient time target is 45 minutes for a trained operator. This is execution within our locked template — no retopology, no UV work, no shader building, no animation. SKILLS SUMMARY Skill Required for Primary Role Required for Bonus Role Principled Hair BSDF — Melanin params Essential Not needed Hair Curves (Blender 3.3+) Essential Not needed Blender asset library creation Essential Not needed Reference-based grooming artistry Essential Not needed Geometry Nodes (existing group usage) Required Required Edit Mode hole filling Not needed Required Sculpt Mode — Flatten / Smooth Not needed Required Texture Paint — Clone / Blur Not needed Required Full-scalp wig/hairstyle method Alternative — show us if you have it.

Project ID: 40367795