Hair Tool 4

Hair Tool 4 (for Blender 4.2 and above)¶

Hair Tool Art by Ellinor Morén

Hair Tool is Blender add-on for creating hair cards based on 3d curves.

This add-on will help you generate hair-cards, UV's, bake textures and model hair-cards.

Features include:

Procedural strand generation using modifiers (called Hair System) and Deformers (nodes inside these modifiers)
Curve Modeling Tools (resampling, knife tool, linear deformer, custom transform tools etc),
Guiding strands with Grid mesh,
Track Mesh - sculpt your hair rather than groom.
Hair Drawing (or extending) - very fast way to create hair cards from scratch,
Hair Library - learn and modify by using one of many hair presets,
Presets - save and load hair settings for: deformers, hair systems (one or multiple)
Texture creation - bake your hair textures (diffuse, depth, alpha, flow maps etc.)
automated uv handling - UVs can be assigned to each strand automatically,
multiple types of Hair Profiles support,
one click Convert hair to mesh
Sample vertex color/weights from mesh,
Automated rigging with jiggle physics,

And more!

Quick Start¶

Example of procedural hair generation with Hair Tool 4.x. Hair is guided with few manually groomed strands

Fastest way to get started with Hair Tool:

One minute Hair Setup - quickest way to create hair using hair draw feature (no speedup)
Two minute Hair Setup - basics hairstyle with split, and grooming
Curly Hair for beginner - it shows Curly hair as example, but it covers basic workflow of: adding guides then child strands, grooming, Editing UVs, adding Deformers, export,
Introduction Video - bit long, 1-hour, general overview of: Strand Generators, Deformers, Input Masks, Defining UVs, Baking Textures
Cyberpunk beginner Hair - Cyberpunk 2077 hair modeling tutorial by Eagul,

Links to most important sections in Hair Tool:

Hair System types - first step is to generate hair, using one of various Hair System types,
Hair Deformers - then affect generated hair look with Deformers. They can be stacked one after another.
Input Masks - any Deformer input can be masked by one (or more) masks, like: vertex group, texture, length etc. Can be stacked just like Deformers.
Define/Modify UVs - Add and tweak UV regions to map your haircards.
Finalize Hair - before exporting hair to game engine - convert curve hair to mesh haircards (with materials and UVs).

Video Tutorials¶

Art by Ellinor Morén

Overview of Hair System (for HTool 3.x, but ver 4.x is similar). After 10 min overview, I also show how to make example hairstyle with split.
Explanation of how Input Masks work, in Hair Tool 3.x (they work same in ver 4.x).
Explanation of how Deformers Masks work, in Hair Tool 3.x (they work similar in ver 4.x).
Curves From Grid - modeling technique explained for HTool 3.x (some things are simpler in ver 4.x, new video coming soon)
Track To Mesh - modeling technique explained for HTool 3.x
Short Hair modeling technique - bit old - but the workflow is almost same in HTool 3. and 4.x,
Track To Curve and to Mesh video for HTool 3.x
~~Bit old tutorials by Jack Perry - Part 01 and Part 02~~

Add-on location¶

Hair Tool Pie Menu and panels in right Sidebar(N)

Access basic operations from Ctrl+Shift+H Pie Menu (hotkey can be changed in preferences).
Hair Tool side panel: right Sidebar(N): "Hair Tool" tab.
Hair Tool Modeling Tool can be accessed from left sidebar(T) (see icon outlined in red on the image above)

Installation¶

To install Hair Tool you need zip file from your Gumroad account. Then, inside Blender, go to:

Edit > Preferences > Add-ons, and click 'Install' button.

And navigate to hair_tool_3.xy.zip file location.

Installation For Blender 3.6 use hair_tool_3.x zip files!

Updating¶

Hair Tool has build-in auto updater which will download and install the latest add-on release. To use auto updater go to:

Edit > Preferences > Add-ons > Hair Tool > press Check for update.

If new version is found, press Update addon button, wait few seconds and restart blender.

Note: To prevent excessive email notifications and minimize spam, I publish smaller updates and bug fixes without increasing the version number. When enough new features or fixes are implemented, I release a new official version with an increased release number. If you want to get the 'smaller' bugfixes but the addon shows that you already have the latest version, use Reinstall Current Version. This will download the smaller incremental bug fixes..

You can also download updates manually by getting new zip file from your Gumroad account. You should have received download link to zip file, with email when you purchased Hair Tool.

Update Addon Checking for new version of Hair Tool from Preferences panel

Limitations¶

~~No cross-profile support (X like profile - where profile is made from two crossing haircards). It is on my TODO list~~ Implemented in HTool 4.0
Pasting hair-preset won't work (using blenders Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V). This is due to Blender limitation. As a workaround is to store preset in hair library and then append it from there to new file.
If you use 'Add' brush in hair curve Sculpt Mode, profile will not be visible on new strands. This is due to bug in Blender - reported here. As a workaround use 'Set Radius' deformer with 'Build up' option disabled - to override haircard radius to 1. Fixed in Blender 4.2
~~You can't move vertices in curve Edit Mode, if 'Strands Overlay' is enabled. This is due to bug in Blender - reported [here]~~(https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/116763). Fixed in Blender 4.2
~~Undo won't work after editing curve radius in Curve Edit mode. This is due to bug in Blender - reported here.~~ - fixed in Hair Tool directly.

Support¶

Hair Tool Art By Colin Nitta

For support or bug reports use this discord server.