Hair With Track Mesh¶

Hair with Track Mesh operator will setup Hair System with Track to Mesh deformer with one click.

Use F9 key -> to adjust initial offset of Track Mesh from base mesh

The main idea is to sculpt or edit guide mesh, rather than comb the hair curves. This is especially useful for short hair, beard, eyebrows, etc. when you want to work in non-destructive way.

In my test I was surprised how easy it is to sculpt hair with this setup and the resulting hair was very uniform giving me much better look for beard of eyebrows compared to traditional curves grooming, with interpolated children.

Example of sculpting Track Mesh. See how simple it is to modify all the strand

Note: It is often good idea to add shapekey to your Guide mesh, and work on it with shapekey enabled. This way you can always go back to original shape of guide mesh

Video Tutorial¶

In first 13 minutes of this video I show how to use this Hair with Track Mesh feature (rest of video is about how to use it for actual hair - can be skipped if you are interested only in basics, of how 'Hair with Track Mesh' works)

Parameters¶

The only initial parameter you can control is under F9 key - Offset - it will offset track mesh from base mesh.
All the other parameters are controlled by Hair System: Track To Mesh and other deformers

Note: The reason why there on only one parameter available under F9 key is that, when I tried to draw popup panel with all the parameters it was crashing the Blender every time. Crashes means, that there is bug in blender itself, but I was unable to create bug report (the code and setup for Track to Mesh is very complicated, thus it is hard to simplify and provide bug report to blender devs)