13 Workflows To Place The Hair Cards For Real-time Hair
Here are some useful techniques for working with hair cards for game-ready hair. Since, the whole process is slow, intimidating, there are some hacks, tools and plugins that can speed up the process.
1. Using Hair Card IMM Brushes in ZBrush
The IMM hair brush is a curve brush that creates polygonal strip, which can easily be deformed/moved and tweaked with the curve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfHIJu416fE
You can also checkout the Hair IMM brushed from other artists here:
2. Curve Wrap Workflow in Maya
Check out this tutorial by Mihai Alexandru Gales where he shows how he utilized Maya's Curve Wrap option to place hair cards for the character.
3. Convert the curves from xGen to ribbons in Maya
4. Script - spPaint3d script in Maya to paint the hair planes
5. Using Curves in Blender
6. Covert Hair particles to Hair Cards in Blender
7. Hair Tool For Blender
11. Script Coiffure For Maya
12. Ornatrix tool for Maya
13. Manually by hand - in Maya
For a complex hairstyle, I like to place cards manually - it's easy to follow the precise concepts with controlling every strand. I usually place the cards in a soft preview mode in Maya, as shown in Sushan Manandhar's tutorial and then Smooth and Reduce the polygon count as described by Ashley Sparling in this video.