Texture Creation

Hair tool comes with build in blend file template, that can be used for baking curves or particle hair to textures. You can bake following passes:

  • Diffuse
  • AO
  • Normal Map
  • Opacity Mask
  • Root Mask (gradient that goes from black to white along the strands length)
  • Random ID mask (give random gray value to each strand)
  • Flow Map (perturbs tangent vector - useful for driving anisotropic specular direction)
  • Direction Alternative to Flow Map. May give slightly better results
  • Depth Mask

Texture baking panel Build-in hair baking scene, that comes with Hair Tool. You can select output path and file name, resolution, bake quality etc.

Video Tutorial

Video above shows: baking extra passes, previewing bake result, importing textures into your file. Finally last part is about customization of hair preset used for rendering

Baking Textures

To bake hair texture:

  • Save current blend file.
  • Press 'Open Baking scene' button located in right UI Sidebar(N): "Hair Tool" tab -> 'Hair Bake' panel. New scene will be loaded, with example hair setup ready to be baked (you may want to save this template scene as new blend file, to avoid overriding the 'master' template)
  • The 'Hair Bake' panel will contain new options. Enable bake passes with Shift+click on multiple the bake passes buttons that you want to bake
  • Set output path for baked textures, resolution, bake name etc.
  • Press 'Bake Hair' button to bake selected passes

Texture baking panel Example of baked hair passes - diffuse, AO, opacity etc.

You can customize suffix given to each pass output texture name in addon preferences -> Baking Tab.

Texture channel mixing

Texture channel mixing Custom nodes similar to texture nodes - it will help you pack your bake results into new texture RGBA channels

Note:If you enable button 'Composite channels', Hair Tool will automatically create node setup with input textures from baked images, after baking is finished. Texture channel mixing

Flatten to UV Shape

Create flattened version of hair, from base mesh UVs. Useful when you want to bake hair system, without having to convert hair to mesh . To un-flatten object run this operator again

On left we have Hair System attached to Suzane, we flatten it using UVMap. On right you can see result of baking that flat shape to texture

Note1: For baking flattened hair use baking scene setup.