Authoring hair for video games has a lot of pain points (i.e., sorting hair cards, UV’ing, making adjustments, etc). The idea behind this tool was to take data from Zbrush, an application that most artists are comfortable in, and then create a fluid pipeline to convert a Fibermesh into a useable hair arrangement for a real-time engine. I personally have wanted to build a tool/script to layout hair cards in a spiral for years, but no tech artist or graphics programmer seemed keen enough on the idea. I also wanted tools that would allow me to sort the hair based on an arbitrary object that I placed. This tool dynamically sorts hair cards, laying out UVs based on their location relative to the crown object (red is closest, violet is furthest away). Because all hair can be unwrapped in a consistent way, the artist only needs to create a master or generic tangency map, anisotropic map, etc.

I created my own “polygon-based” creep SOP in order to have the crown object ride the meshes it is used on. My creep sop can use either UV’s (which the tool generates for itself) or a Raycast based method to stick and travel along the mesh.

I have a lot of additional features in mind for this tool. Version 0.2 will likely be based out of H14 (waiting for more stable builds) and will feature some non-destructive hair grooming and creation tools as well as the ability to transfer hair to other meshes. I also hope to be able to expand the users ability to edit hair cards by region.