An add-on for Blender that simplifies the creation process of low/medium poly hair models.
Jose Conseco has a nice add-on for Blender called Hair Tool that simplifies the creation process of low/medium poly hair models. The tool is meant for generating hair mesh ribbons with UVs from bezier/nurbs curves – the way developers are doing hair for most of the games today.
Features:
- generating curves from mesh surfaces
- adding bevel profile to curves thus making them into curve ribbons
- easy and convenient switching back and forth between curve ribbons and mesh, while preserving mesh UVs
- ability to adjust ribbons radius profile over strand length to taper the ribbons shape
- ability to generate hair spline ribbons from blender Particle Hair system.
Basic workflow:
- create grid mesh (quad only) in basic shape of hair, that will be source of hair curves
- mark one of border edges as sharp – it will be root of generated hair
- Use button ‘Curves from surface’ – to generate curves. Play with F6 setting to vary the look, amount of splines
- Generate hair ribbons by pressing ‘Hair setup’ button.
- If you want to switch to mesh version of you curve based ribbons, press ‘Curves to Ribbons’ button.
Detailed info can be fund on the artist’s blog.
What you get:
- hair Tool add-on
- demo blend file, with models that were used to render promo image for Hair Tool. It contains: female head, hair material, hair alpha texture, hair ribbons (4 styles), surface objects that were used to generate hair splines.
Update 1.1:
- works better with custom unit scale
- added radius param, to ‘Change radius profile’ operator
- source surfaces will take modifier into account (eg. mirror)
Update 1.2:
- Adjust generated curves tilt, so it is aligned to source mesh surface with new – ‘Align curve tilt’ button
- Added ability to generate hair spline ribbons from blender Particle Hair system.
- Improved speed when generating curves from surface
- Improved UI
- Minor tweaks, bug-fixes and optimizations
Update 1.2.1:
- normalized scale for generated ribbons (bigger ribbons for bigger objects, smaller ribbons for small object
- normalized hair generations (similar look of generated strands for small and big objects)
- improved ‘strands generation from Particle hair’ – operation will update previously generated ribbons if exist (before it would create new child ribbons each time )