Can I make a suggestion. to get this I imagine drawing curves with the grease pencil, then extruding a polygon along the curve,
for the procedural texture, noise stretched in one direction (to create strands) with an alpha gradiend at the end.
Hey, what about adding a ‘hair modifier’? Then it would be non destructive of the original mesh, and you could change how you want to view it, and control the parameters right there. Good or bad idea?
I feel like this would take quite a while to render with every hair being an individual strand. I once created hair for a character and converted it to mesh to be rendered in cycles, and it took forever. Perhaps it’s because strands aren’t supported yet?
Anyway, this would be really cool! I can’t code, but I can do a bunch of testing or anything like that.
I also imagine it would be interesting to use sculpt to move the polygons about as if brushing them.
I also imagine it would be interesting to use sculpt to move the polygons about as if brushing them.
you could do that if it was a mesh modifier
this is going to a good direction im working on some ideas
What if we took an object and had it so that it could automatically be filled with curves based on the flow of the geometry?Then you could define how many curves, and have a second layer of interpolated type instances of those curves. I guess as a rough example how the cloud generator works, but with curves instead of particles and volume.
When I saw this post in the forum I got really excited. Because as a beginning game programmer this is something that I have always wanted in blender. But then I realized the thread was a request by someone to make such a script 
Oh well I will go back to waiting. And NO my skills with python are no where near level that is needed to code something like that.
It seems like part of the requested functionality might overlap with Nicholas’ skinning modifier - you could draw out bones and skin with planes instead of closed mesh?
Nicholas who? Where is that posted?
youre thinking of that skin modifier?
I remember the surface sketching script that let you draw with grease pencil but skinned two lines.
also array sketching.
perhaps we want a combination of both. where you draw single polygon line with grease pencil.
@craig & @ mrjynx
Both of those seem to resolve/enhance the modeling basics, but still don’t address the then adding of hairs.
In essence the hair system would then use any mesh, just as long as it knew the root and tip area along with the curve between them, but it still requires the hair generation code to be changed to use said mesh.
I think it would be fairly simple to code the hair curve guides by doing something along the lines of…
Start vertex, follow vertex extrusion, end vertex = curve.
For all points on the grid, calculate the in-between points and average the offsets, and create additional Start and End Vertex curves.
Calculate user set variations that apply to the basic curve. (length is probably a good example, as is random spacing)
Create visual hair particle using other user set properties. (frizz, colour, thickness, etc.)
Because the hair system would be based on a mesh… every other type of constraint would be a bog standard one. So bones, softbody, cages, paint, cloth, forces, etc. would be already handled, as would the addition of things like skinning and extrusion.
It is only the generation of the graphical hair that would be needed… so simplifying the whole hair system.
didnt really understand that as im not a coder. you want to add a mesh cage for the volume, then generate hairs inside that? hairs meaning curves that stick to the skull with polygons extruded along em. but how does it decide length direction gravity?
I realised you can kinda do what I said already, draw curves that attach the the head with the grease pencil, convert to curves then extrude. only issue is direction of extrude relies on I think direction of normal.
looks crap but u get the idea.
I’m not a coder either, sadly, so I’m just suggesting ideas that maybe someone else could adapt/use.
Yes, it would be a mesh cage with hairs generated within that mesh.
By using extrusion only, each guide curve would be generated along the path of the extrusion, which would act as guides for the hair generation within the mesh.
As the guide curves would cover an area, it would be relatively simple to work out hair coordinates between the guides.
As the mesh would be subjected to the forces, the mesh would deform, which in turn would modify the guide curves.
The advantage would be that hairs themselves would not have to interact with forces and objects, which is very time consuming, prone to strange things happening, and often results in hairs failing to detect collisions and falling inside objects.
In your example, each of those extrusions could be marked as cloth as as such they can be affected with gravity and forces and collisions.
With the starting points automatically being pinned it would then allow the extrusions to be, under the hood, converted into curve guides and then further subdivided into individual curves and finally into actual rendered hair strands.
I think Eclectiel [Bsurface creator] is the right person for coding this tool would be great, would be willing to contribute for the development
I think it would be better to use the particule hair but only a few, maybe 10 hair, then we can change the shape of each hair in particule mode.
Then launch a script how tranforme the hair particule to curve(easy to make with 2 or 3 loop for), make an array that fit the curve and finaly a curve mofifier then the array faollow the shape oh the curve.
I’ll probably try to do this.
I know about the method of using particle hair then shaping it to the hairstyle that you want. Then turning the particles into a mesh and extruding faces from that mesh. That tends to generate too many polys for use in a game engine or to generate an animation.
I was thinking something that would do this type of hair.
http://www.paultosca.com/varga_hair.html
Using that technique automatically.
that link does not work. I think you copied and pasted an abbrieviated form of the link
Here’s an in-depth example of how it’s done in other software:
The plugin is this: http://www.ephere.com/plugins/autodesk/max/ornatrix/, it’s used by Blur Studios for example.
Could serve as inspiration?
hello some time no post I would like to see some reaction from the developers on this idea, which would be original if it were to be implemented in blender i dint see any 3d application whit a tool like this one