The Release Schedule of Ninjio

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Release Schedule of Ninjio

Introduction

So some of you reading this may think to yourself "Wow Gismo, that Ninjio game seems pretty impressive, I wonder how long it will take for you to get anything done with it". As much as I want Ninjio to be the best game in existence, I would also like to release it in a timely manner. I would like for the game to be released either during my college career or shortly after that. Besides a big final release, I would like to have the ability to show off Ninjio early through the use of game play demonstrations.

Goals

One of the times that I wish to have a game play demo ready for people to play is during Cumberland Valley (my high school) District Arts Festival. This festival is where many of the art classes in CV get the chance to display their work to the rest of the school district as well as the public. I feel that this would give me the chance to set up the game in an E3 sort of manner, a video game show where many developers show off their games prior to releasing them with presentations and demos of their games. I hope that by the District Arts Fest to have a playable demo of the first major boss fight along with some of the story surrounding the fight. This demo should be relatively short but still give people a look into what Ninjio is all about.


Besides getting a playable demo out for the District Arts Fest, I have no solid plans for Ninjio's full release other than I would like to have it out before I get out of college, so I can add it to my resume.

Steps to get to the goal

In order to get to the point that I can make a playable demo for the festival, I have set a certain set of steps that I need to do. The first thing that I have, as shown in my Trello project management file, is to have the characters that I need to make demo happen made. 

The Trello board for Ninijo

For the demo, only 4 out of the 7 total characters will need to be made. I have done some math and figured out that I can have all 7 characters done by the end of this marking period if I finish one character each week. This would mean that I would have to sketch, model, texture, and rig the character all within a week, giving me a day or so for each of these steps. This may seem impossible but I have been doing this for about a week at this point and have found it to be possible if I work on my characters in class and during my free time before and after school.

Boss fights, the best skills test for video games

The second step to my master plan is to get the environment that the boss fight takes place in modeled. This should not take too long, so I am allotting around 1-2 weeks to get this done during the third marking period. While this is going on, I will also be working on, during my own time, programming the boss fight itself.

The third step is for me to program some of the allies and how they act during the boss fight. This is something that I have been doing some research on and have not found an adequate solution for, but I will outline my goals for the allies whenever I get around to it. The same thing could be said for the enemies, I have not found a good solution to how I want them to act.

Overall, I have a plan to some degree. This is the first time that I have put the plan down into wording, but I hope that this gives everyone reading a plan for how I am going to develop Ninjio going further.

This week's work log:

Monday December 11th: Modeled Yuan Shi

Tuesday December 12th: Did some more modeling work for Yuan Shi

Wednesday December 13th: Textured Yuan Shi

Thursday December 14th: Rigged Yuan Shi

Friday December 15th: Sketched 坏人

-. .. -. .--- .. ---

The Design of Jade Gate

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Design of Jade Gate

Introduction

Ninjio's story primarily takes place in two settings. One is a city that has pushed to develop their future alongside nature while the other, the primary setting in Ninjio, chose to develop their future without nature. Although these two contrasts are not a primary part of Ninjio's story, I felt that they had the opportunity to be an interesting, and very extreme, contrast to each other. The city where the main portion of the game takes place is called Jade Gate, or 玉門 in Chinese. I think that Ninjio may finally be at the point where I need to create some portions of Jade Gate for use in testing game play features.

Jade Gate's design and influence

I find it interesting how Jade Gate was the first one out of the two settings where I knew exactly how I wanted it to look. I wanted the city to be the "City of the Future" where it's leader wanted as much innovation as possible, however this resulted a city where nature was destroyed and many human ethics were violated as well. This kind of city, where innovation was heavily encouraged, resulted in me thinking back to a few YouTube videos about Walt Disney's EPCOT project that I have watched recently.

Wait, the Epcot in Walt Disney World in Florida?

Walt Disney and his Experimental Prototype for a Community of Tomorrow

Well, no. In short, without going through too many details, Walt Disney before he died had come up with an Experimental Prototype for a Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT for short). This community was built to be able to survive, thrive, and show off what the future of cities can be. At the heart of this project, there was a gigantic city that was planned to be built using the finest technology that the  1970's could offer, including a labyrinth of transportation options like monorails and an integrated roadway design for the city never thought of before then. This concept of EPCOT city faded away with the passage of Walt Disney himself, however the idea of bring the best technology and innovation to a single place was eventually incorporated into the EPCOT theme park built in the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. I would like to make the main city where the story in Ninjio takes place to be heavily influenced by Walt Disney's idea for a "Community of Tomorrow" as I feel that Jade Gate's constant strive to innovate would fit well with the original drawings that the Walt Disney Company did for EPCOT city.

The model on display in Walt Disney World
of EPCOT City

So, what does a city of the future look like?

The road layout of EPCOT City,
note the circular nature of the city

A cross section of the city of tomorrow, look at those transit options!

This is a very difficult question, however when I look at the concept art for EPCOT city, I see many things that I like. One such thing is how the city is highly planned, with higher density buildings like apartments and high rise office towers situated in the center of the city and lower density buildings like single family homes and larger office complexes located on the edge of the city limits. Another thing that I found in the plans for EPCOT city was how much the transportation infrastructure is planned. In the drawings for EPCOT city, there are many modes of transportation ranging from roadways built onto of each other to various light rail systems (monorails, electric trains etc) that weave throughout the city. There are many other things that I find interesting inside of the concept art for EPCOT city, however I will spare all of you from my annoyingly long list. These are just some of the things that I want to incorporate in Jade Gate's layout and design.

This week's work log:

Monday December 4th: Finalized Sketch of Kuai Long

Tuesday December 5th: Did the body for Kuai Long

Wednesday December 6th: Finalized the rig for Kuai Long

Thursday December 7th: Textured Kuai Long

Friday December 8th: Did some eye textures for Kuai Long, restructured the project file structure and naming scheme…. yeah

The sun sets on Walt Disney's EPCOT

.. ..-.     -.-- --- ..-     -.-. .- -.     -.. .-. . .- --     .. - --··--     -.-- --- ..-     -.-. .- -.     -.. ---     .. -     -····-     .-- .- .-.. -     -.. .. ... -. . -.--

The Art of War I: Weapons and their role

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of War I: Weapons and their role

Introduction

Most, if not all, of the main characters in Ninjio will have their own unique weapons that they use in combat. These weapons will be uniquely tailored to the character's personality and skills. For example, one of the character is of a short, almost dwarf like, stature with a knack for fixing things. Therefore that character's weapon may be a small, yet powerful, wrench-like weapon to suite the character's physical size and the character's mechanical know-how. Since Ninjio is set in a futuristic China, I would like to bring as many elements of the Chinese culture into the game as possible. One such element of China's culture that I find fascinating is how they view and use their weapons.

Chinese culture and how weapons are used and viewed

A good example of a Western game that favors the whole
"I'm a big guy with a gun, now eat it" sort of mentality

There is a dramatic difference between Asian cultures and western (USA and European countries etc) culture in terms of weapons and their role in war. In most Asian cultures, a weapon like the sword or even a gun is considered an extension to the body during war, where the sword or the gun is an extension of the artistic art form that war is. This means that in Asia, you would see less of the movie-esk "Imma gonna run at you with my sword raised above my head and shout like a madman" scene and more of the "Imma ninja, I am going to sneak around and stealthy kill you when you least expect it" sort of moments. Since this is something that is buried deep into Asian culture, video games that are made in Japan, where most major video game companies are headquartered, and any other Asian country tend to follow this mantra of using weapons to extend the body's capabilities. I hope to emulate this part of Asian culture in Ninjio but how?

But how?

I ask this because as an interactive experience, video games and the designers behind them have very little control over how the game is being played. The few things that designers can implement to increase their control can either be obtrusive, like a big invisible wall that the player cannot get through, or they can be subtle, like having only a certain number of bullets before you have to seek more ammunition (thus making the player have to pull out of a fight). Of the two ways of gaining control over the player's game play, I would like to make the 2nd option, making the boundaries very natural, be more prominent than the other option. 

Now rounding back to the original question, I would like Ninjio's combat to be as awesome and epic as I can while still sticking to the Chinese culture of using weapons as an extension of the body. In my opinion, I can do four things to insure that this can happen. 

One is that I can offer the player lots of movement mechanics to ensure that sneaking up behind an enemy is as fun as possible. I have already programmed the movement into the Ninjio, and boy is it smooth. I have it programmed so that there is no delay between you input an action and when it is carried out by the game. This greatly helps players move around the scene, get to where they want to go faster, and it overall makes playing the game feel very responsive and smooth. 

Another mechanic that I have implemented already in the game is a teleportation ability that the player can use after a short cool down. This allows players to pick a place to go to and use a teleport bolt that brings them to that place instantaneously. I may need to think about having this ability unlock around halfway through the game because it is seriously fun to use and may be a bit overpowered compared to the normal movement that the player has.

One thing that I can keep in mind while creating the levels for Ninjio is to make them as open-ended as possible. This means that enemies will be placed in a manner that allows the players to come up with different ways of getting around them or even killing them. One example of this may be a situation where there is a guard in the very center of a circular plaza surrounded by a high wall on one side and a fountain in the middle. They player, in this case, could get up on that high wall to achieve some high ground or they could just go to the center of the plaza and start fighting. In the second option, the player could then use the fountain or the walls as cover from the opposing fire coming from the guard.

A durability chart for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Another mechanic that I could implement would be similar to something found in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in which weapons break after some use. This could force players to not use their main weapon all the time and maybe force them to sneak around enemies like the ninja that they are. One of my concerns with something like this is that I would then have to program some sort of inventory system so that players can swap out weapons when they break, which is surprisingly difficult to get right. Another concern that I have with this system is that when I play Breath of the Wild I tend to have lots of "Oh crap" situations where my good weapon breaks halfway through a boss fight, but maybe that's just me being a bad player. Overall, I don't think that this mechanic would fit Ninjio's action packed game play.

These are just some of my ideas on how to enforce a lesser use of weapons inside of Ninjio, but I am sure that as the game progresses I can come up with some more ideas. Out of all four ideas, the only one that I am going to scrap in its entirely is the the weapon breaking system that I described and reputed above.

This week's work log:

Monday November 27th: No school, enjoy crashing those Amazon servers!

Tuesday November 28th: Worked on the eyes for Bing Nu

Wednesday November 29th: Worked a bit on the model for -... .- ... - .. --- -.

Thursday November 30th: Textured  ... -. ...-.. --- -.

Friday December 1st: Did final touches on .- --- .. - ... -. ...-

. .--     -.. . . -.     .-     -. --- .. - ... .- -...

The Code of Inverse Kinematics

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Code of Inverse Kinematics

Introduction

In most modern video games, developers use a technique called inverse kinematics, commonly shortened to IK, to insure that various parts of characters are interacting with the world as they are meant to. This can be useful when a character has to touch an object at a point or for a character to plant their feet on an uneven surface. The best part about IK is that it can be coupled with normal animation to insure that the character will plant its feet on an uneven surface even when it is doing an animation like running or walking.

Before and after IK, notice how the character's feet are in the ground without using IK

How a computer sees the human body

IK in Unity3D

In the Unity game engine, the process of IK is fairly simple to set up. As long as the character fits a normal humanoid bone structure, Unity automatically sees and understands which bones are for what part of the body (left/right foot, head, left/right hand etc). Once Unity knows that the model is correctly set up, then it will go ahead and create an avatar for the model. An avatar is a simplified bone structure that is generated from the model's original bones for the game engine to understand how certain bones interact with each other (IE. hand is connected to the arm bone). Inside of the code, you can then tell these main bones, like the hand bones and the foot bones, to move to a position and Unity will position the connected bones to the correct position.

The Code

This is just a small thing that I put together, the actual IK script used by Ninjio has more things using IK. Hopefully the comments, in green, will help those with little programming knowledge understand the process that it takes in order to get IK on one bone inside of Unity. If you would like to learn more about this, here are some links:

Unity Documentation on IK
Unity documentation on the Animator class which has a whole lot more than just IK under its belt

But when none of those work then ask Google, it'll help for sure!

Gismo's thoughts

I am honestly surprised at how easy it was for me to set up IK for Bing Nu's model! Surprisingly, the hardest part of getting her IK correct was figuring out how and when to have her foot follow IK and when to follow the animation inside of the programing. I plan IK in Ninjio to allow the character's heads to turn and look at an object, pick up an object with their hand, and to make their feet actually touch the floor (no floaty feet here)!

This week's work log:

Monday November 13th:  Started modeling Iron Flurry, but had to start over

Tuesday November 14th: Started modeling the Iron Flurry again

Wednesday November 15th: Finished modeling the Iron Flurry

Thursday November 16th: Textured the Iron Flurry, but for some reason it was deleted

Friday November 17th: Finished texturing the Iron Flurry

. .--     -.. . . -.     .-     .-. --- .. ...- .- ...

The Art of Character Association

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of Character Association

Introduction

One thing that I have been having issues with in Ninjio is how to have players memorize and associate the names of the characters to their personalities and such. This is hard because I am adamant in keeping the original Chinese names unaltered in the final game, even though they are fairly difficult to pronounce correctly. I have toyed around with some ideas and have came up with a few methods for getting the name to image association correct in players minds.

How to be memerible, the right way

Borderland's style of character introduction

One thing that I found common in many video games, like Telltale Game's Borderlands series, is a way of quickly giving off some sort of information about the character along with some sort of memorable line that the character either says a lot or they center actions around. Borderlands does this in a very obtrusive way, with the game pausing, zooming in the character, the character saying some sort of silly voice line, and then the game displays their name along with a line that the character typically uses as their motto for their actions in the game.

Another method that I saw a lot in other video games to display character information is to have a screen that the players can access at any point in the game. Games that use this method typically just display factual information like the character's age, height, width, attack information, and any other information that the player may find useful. While this can display lots of factual information, I only know a few games that use this style of display to show character personality information, however I plan on using and displaying this information differently in Ninjio.

Character profiles in Ninjio

What I am planning for Ninjio's character profiles is a hybrid between the two methods that I outlined above. I plan on taking the memorable lines, the character portraits and the silly voice lines that Borderlands has and combining them with some other information about the character's personality or history (see sketch). These profiles will only be available for the player for the 7 main characters that the player will be interacting with throughout the story.

Incentivizing? I think so!

Incentivizing the player to view these profiles

As the game is currently written, the player (playing as the main character of course) meets the villain early into the story and the main character's mentor very early into the storyline. I think that it would be appropriate for the player to then be prompted, hopefully in a manner that seems natural to the player, to open up the character profiles for the main character, the villain, and the main character's mentor. As for the rest of the cast, including Bing Nu, I have a scene where the main character is required to go around and introduce himself to the rest of the cast (minus one!). I think that when the players introduce themselves to these characters, their profiles unlock in the character profile menu. The last character, I will just wait until he hacks into his own profile to unlock it.

This week's work log:

Monday November 6th: Made a run cycle for Bing Nu

Tuesday November 7th: Made a valiant attempt to get the foot IK working, which ultimately failed

Wednesday November 8th: Worked more on foot IK and it seems to work well

Thursday November 9th: Started work on one of the weapons, the Omega Blaster

Friday November 10th: finished modeling the Omega Blaster, ultimately got rid of it for various reasons

--. -. .. --.. .. .-.. .- .. - .. -. ..     .-.. --- -.-. --- - --- .-. .--.     -. --- .. - ... .- -...

End of Marking Period 1 Blog Posts Peer Review

End of Marking Period 1 Blog Posts Peer Review

After reviewing some of my peer's end of marking period 1 blog posts, I have learned about many of my classmate's projects. Many of these projects interest me greatly.

My friend Keaton's project was the first to peak my interest. He is currently working on an environment for a virtual reality (VR) animation that he is doing, see the video that I have on this blog for more information about VR animations. The environment he is working on is strikingly similar to the flight deck of the Star Ship Enterprise found in the Star Trek series. This fact alone is enough for me to instantly fall in love with it, but Keaton is also putting a lot of time into making sure that every square inch of his space ship is filled to the brim with details, as anyone can go and look anywhere in the scene.

Another one of my friends Michael is currently working on the scenery and initial modeling for characters in a, supposedly, action packed animation. I have been friends with Michael for the longest time, since middle school actually, and I have seen the development of most of the characters that he wishes to have in this animation and the story line and action sequence of this animation come to life over the years. I hope that this animation turns out as good as he has been telling me, because I feel partially connected to both the characters and he animation as a whole.

Unreal Engine is another game engine just like Unity!
Unreal is used more due to how easy it is to make a game in it,
however Unity is slightly better thanks to it's better licensing policies.

There are two more people whose projects have stood out to me. Bado is currently working on a video game inside of Unreal Engine 4 (another game engine). From the sounds of it, the game play will be very similar to Ninjio. The other person whose project really spoke to me was Garet's. He is currently working on bring a fantasy world to life. This world of his has apparently been around since he was in elementary school, quite like how Ninjio's world was created when I was a junior in high school. I wish both of these people the utmost luck and hope that their projects exceed any standards they set forth for themselves.

This week's work log:

Monday October 30th: View a few classmate’s end of marking period blog posts

Tuesday October 31th: Started working on Bing Nu’s animation

Wednesday November 1st: Finished up the first idle animation for Bing Nu

Thursday November 2nd: Finished another idle animation for Bing Nu

Friday November 3rd: Made a walk cycle for Bing Nu and played around with IK in Unity

The Art of Optimization

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of Optimization

Introduction

It has been my goal to insure that Ninjio is the best experience that I can offer to its players. I had many smaller goals that I have for Ninjio to insure this high quality experience, however one of them (and the most important one to the gamer inside me) is making sure that the game will run at a constant 60 frames per second (FPS) or higher at all times on all sorts of hardware.

60 whats?

Without diving too far into the technology that we all use on a nearly daily basis, a frame in terms of a computer is the image that the computer is outputting to your monitor or display. It is well documented that the human eye can only see around 30 to 60 of these images per second, any lower number and the image would look choppy while any higher number would result in a similar looking image while wasting computing power, which is not ideal. Gamers, like myself, can definitely "feel" the difference between 60 fps and it's lower counterparts. Most games these days strive to run at this 60 fps threshold, however most fail (especially when running on consoles) and run at around 30 fps. 

So what are the benefits of this higher frame rate?

Look at the difference, the 30 FPS image looks smeared
compared to the 60 FPS one.

In short, the higher the frame rate (and therefore higher fps) the faster you see the result of your action, say moving your mouse or pressing a button. This is generally what you want in games where there is a lot of action going on at a time, like Ninjio. Another benefit to this higher frame rate is that images do not look blurry and smeared when you pause the game, as there are more images being outputted to you monitor.

The challenges of achieving higher frame rates

In short, there are 2 ways to achieve higher frame rates, by either optimizing your code or optimizing your art. While optimizing your code could yield a better result on a per optimization basis, it is generally harder to do. Art, on the other hand is very easy to do. It is important to optimize your art as best as you can, even while you are creating it.

How to optimize your art

Not a too much changes visually here

One easy way of optimizing art in video games is to make sure you are using the least amount of vertices (or points in 3D space) as you can. By doing so and asking questions like "Do I really need a ton vertices to make a sphere when I could do it in much less vertices and have it look the same", you can optimize different pieces of art very easily. Another method is to remove any faces (3 or more vertices put together to make a side of an object) that you know that players are not supposed to see. This could be like the back of a building facade that players cannot see in game or the bottom of a building that would normally be buried under the ground.  These methods are very simple and easy to do, however sometimes you do need a high polygon count on an object or sometimes you do need all of the faces to be filled in, it is situations like this where different programing tricks come in handy.

Level of detail (LOD) in Team Fortress 2

One programming trick is level of detail, or LOD for short. It is the process of making it so that the game engine gradually reduces the amount of detail in the object as object gets farther away from the player. This method has to be programmed, but the results of it can vastly improve the performance of the game.

An example of draw call, look at how the
 trees are rendered together in a single
graphics call, as shown by the grey box.

Another programing trick, one that is fairly easy to do inside of the Unity3D engine, is draw call batching. This trick involves telling the computer that instead of treating each object as its own separate entity upon the rendering of the scene, instead the engine tells the computer that a certain group of objects should be rendered at the same time, thus saving processing time on the computer's side. This trick only works well when you have objects that are static, like building and pieces of the environment that do not move during gameplay.

Occlusion culling in Horizon: Zero Dawn

One last programming trick is called occlusion culling. In short, it makes it so that the computer only renders what the camera inside of the game can see. Normally the computer will render every single object in the scene regardless of if it is onscreen or not. With occlusion culling, the game doesn't render anything that the player cannot see through the camera, so objects behind the player are not even processed and rendered at all. Occlusion culling is used heavily in some of the earlier 3D games like the original Crash Bandicoot. However this method has become popular in modern games like Horizon: Zero Dawn as the method allows for a higher visual fidelity, especially in games where the worlds are large and expansive. 

How to Model: Hair, the Anime Way

Level of detail (LOD) in Team Fortress 2

Disclaimer

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (commonly referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

How to Model: Hair, the Anime Way

The characters of My Hero Academia

Introduction

While working on the model for Bing Nu, I have struggled a bit to make the hair for her look both realistic yet have it fit in with the art style of Ninjio. I have watched numerous tutorials online, however most result in a hyper realistic hair style and shape which would not suite the pre-defined art style of Ninjio. While watching a little bit of Boku No Hero Academia (My Hero Academia in English), one of my favorite animes to watch, I realized that the way hair is done in anime is quite different compared to other art forms.

Unlike other art forms which use individual strands and strokes of hair to make the hair flow and act realistic, anime hair tends to clump the pieces of hair together in one shape. This results in anime hair being more expressive of the character than that of traditional art forms where the hair is just there. Another benefit of using this anime hair style is that the hair on the character could not follow the laws of physics and still look good.

Since this discovery, I have developed a method for modeling this style of hair on characters inside of the Blender 3D modeling programing.

The steps

Step 1) Start out with the head that you wish to cover in hair.

Step 2) Create two bezier curves by pressing Shift-A and then to Create Curve and then to Bezier Curve.
Step 3) Create a bezier circle by pressing Shift-A and then Create Curve and then to Beizer Circle

Step 1

Step 2 (and 3 I guess)

Step 4

Step 4) Under the Shape tab of the Curve Options editor window, set the preview resolution of the bezier circle to 2. Then rename the circle to something that you will remember, I use Hair Bevel Object for mine. Move the circle somewhere in the scene where it will not be in the way of the rest of the modeling.
Step 5) Using one of the bezier curves, go into Edit Mode on it, move the control points and the handles around until they match the ones show in step 5's image. Rename the curve to something you will remember, I use Hair Taper Object for mine. Move the curve somewhere in the scene where it will not be in the way of the rest of the modeling.
around with the handles to make it look like
Step 6) Using the other curve, go into it's Geometry Options under the Curve Options editor window and set the Taper Object to the bezier curve you made in step 5 and the Bevel Object to the circle you made in step 4.

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7) Now position the bezier curve that you made in step 6 so that the control points are where you want your piece of hair to start and end. Maneuver the handles of the curve to make the piece of hair fit along the head. You may want to resize your Hair Taper Object and Hair Bevel Object 
Step 8) Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you are satisfied with the results.
Step 9) Select all the piece of hair and then press Control-J to join all the separate bezier curves into one object

Step 7

Hint: use the mirror modifier to decrease the time that you spend modeling the hair!

Final Results

A monkey with hair, because why not?

 This week's work log:

Monday October 9th: Day Off: Columbus Day

Tuesday October 10th: Started work on Bing Nu’s hair, most ended work ended up scrapped

Wednesday October 11th: more work on Bing Nu’s hair

Thursday October 12th: Finalized work on Bing Nu’s Hair

Friday October 13th: Made hands for Bing Nu, added finishing, modeling, touches