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 )

Buy the tool for $30