All base hairstyles need to be grayscale, colors are applied later by using a library of color gradients to easily apply various colors later on.

For performance, all hairstyles need to remain under 2000 polys which is a bit of a challenge for curly hair, so I kept as many details in the texture as possible only popping out a couple edges of curls for definition.

The texture in this image looks large, but in practice is it later baked on to a large character atlas that includes the skin tone, eye color, and armor textures for each individual character.

This displays the gradient map coloring system in action, these are all color gradients I've made for natural hair colors on Lagenan hairstyles.