Convert

These operators will allow you to convert curve hair with profile, to mesh haircards.

Convert Hair To Mesh

Converts hair curves object to mesh haircards. You will be able to restore original hair system with Restore Hair Object operator.
Use:

  • after you finished making hair in curve mode,
  • before exporting hair to game engine,
  • when you want to rig and animate hair.

This operator ensures that curve: UVs, vertex colors, sampled Colors and other attributes are properly transferred to mesh version of hair.

If you do not want to mess up with your original hair object, use Finalize Hair operator instead.

Finalize Hair

Just like Convert Hair To Mesh, but the generated mesh will stored as separate object. This way your original object is safe (it won't be overwritten) and you can easily delete the generated copy when you're done exporting it.

Operator properties (F9):

  • Join Instances - join result of 'Finalize Hair' into one object.

Cards to Curves

It allows you to extract curves from existing hair-cards (mesh).

Conversion will work even on triangulated, non-uniform mesh

Modal operator Properties:

  • Guide UVs - these UVs orientation will be used to determine hair root to tip direction. Make sure your source mesh have nice UVs going from top (root) to bottom (tip).
  • UV Threshold [Ctrl+Mouse Wheel] - it defines how to simplify hair-cards mesh. The higher the threshold, the more simplified the resulting curves will be.
  • Smooth Factor [Shift+Mouse Wheel] - smooth resulting curves,
  • Reverse Direction [R - key] - flip hair root to tip direction. 'Cards to Curves' operator will draw overlay with hair roots marked in Red and tips in Green color.

Note1: Generate Bones operator uses similar algorithm for extracting hair curves from mesh haircards. See this video to learn how to setup proper Guide Uvs

Note2: After converting mesh to curves, you can resample them using: Ctrl+Shift+H > Resample operator. Use 'Add Profile', from same pie menu, to assign hair profile to new curves.

Keywords: Hair cards to curves, hair to 3d curves, mesh to curves,

Particle Hairs to Curves

Blender has now built-in operator to convert Particle Hair to hair curves. It is located in Particle Hair dropdown menu

After converting Particle Hair to Curves, I used few extra operators from Hair Tool Ctrl+Shift+H menu:

Hair Curves to Particle System

Hair UV This will work only if new curves hair object is selected

  1. First you may need to transfer Hair System to hair curves (e.g. if it is attached to mesh): Ctrl+Shift+H > Transfer Hair System > To Curve
  2. If your hair curves are not 'real' (no curves are visible in Edit mode), bake them to 'real' geometry: Ctrl+Shift+H > Bake All Subsystems
  3. Now finally you should be able to use Blenders built-in: Object menu > Convert to > Particle System (see image above)