Bake hair guide effect to guide hairs, or change shape of hair across guide curve?

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
#1

I am using a hair guide curve to make strands of a braid, because I am not a masochist, nor a madman. I was using simple children since the interpolated children maintained the shape of the original hair patch all the way down the curve, which is obviously incorrect for a braid. The problem is that the simple children do not follow the shape of the patch at the start point, which is also not quite right.

Does anyone know of any way to:

  • Bake the effect of the hair guide curve to the simple guide strands so I can edit them by hand to fit the patch?

  • Make it so I can gently change the shape of interpolated hair over the curve from the original shape of the patch to a more circular shape?

Or something else that might be useful.

Edit: Seems like the simple algorithm does actually follow the shape of the patch when the bezier has a large enough radius. Still would be great to know of any techniques as mentioned though.

Edit 2: Ah, with a large enough radius, the simple algorithm has the same issue as the interpolated. It projects the shape of the patch all the way down the curve.

Edit 3: Tried to use the bake hair dynamics method shown here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/physics/particles/mode.html but get bizarre results.

#2

I would convert the hair system (without children) to mesh and would use hairnet add-on or the new addon- from alexander meissner to convert them back to a hair system, I made a quick test with hairnet and it works.

#3

Could you link the Meissner addon? I think hairnet is not 2.8 ready yet and I’m not sure about its results.

#4

Neither is Meissner’s at the moment, I believe, but you can always do it in 2.79 and bring it to your 2.8 scene.
Here’s the link to his github

#5

Thanks, going to have a go with it now.

#6

So it turns out Hairnet isn’t even 2.79 ready, let alone 2.8. Are you on master? Because I can’t get it to install and from looking at the blenderartists thread, I’m not the only one. I also tried Meissner’s one in 2.79 but it seems to want mesh strips rather than curves or mesh strings. I’ve read that Hair Tool can do what Hairnet did and I’m going to try and find out whether it is possible to import curves as hair guides with that.