HairStruct: Hairtool for Blender
Here's a short video explaining some of the features of the hairtool!
The tool has an export feature which let's you collapse all the modifiers and get a combined mesh duplicate of your hairstyle, ready for export.
Textures are generated in Xgen and rendered out in Arnold. Using render layers I could split up the renders into groups based on factors needed for the textures. In this case, som textures needed a plane to be rendered against, whilst others did not.
These are the different Texture maps that I generated in xGen to be used with this hairstyle. In the end, only the height, normal and alpha was used in engine!
Looking at the leading workflows of strand based modeling, the user-friendliness of nurbs based guides for styling hair was obvious. However, the complete control of manually placed cards, rather than ones procedurally propagated, still seemed to be favored by a lot of artists. In this project, as part of my thesis paper about this topic. I created a hairtool together with John Kardell, in which the manual workflow of styling individual haircards, would be aided by using bezier curves, curve modifiers, and a toolset based upon haircard categories, meant to give the artist automatic variation in their styling process, as well as the ability to retroactively go back and modify the hair or even switch the instanced haircards entirely!
Our thesis paper can be read in full here:
http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1446370/FULLTEXT01.pdf
