How can i bake the hair particles to a normal map?
If i try to convert hair to mesh, and do it normally, blender doesn’t do it, since the mesh does not have any faces.
I tried using the skin modifier to give the strands some thickness, and while it did work, and i managed to bake the particles to this plane, it is horribly laggy, and blender just crashes if i try to to use it for anything more complex than this quick test
Resulting hair mesh, and the normal map i got from it
I’m not sure what your goal is, but you could try an addon called GrabDoc. It’s free on Github but other sites are selling it. It basically renders an orthographic normal map and thus it would be much faster than using the conventional bake method. But it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
What I do is I convert the hair particles to curves, give them thickness, make sure that they’re not too dense in terms of geometry, and then I convert them to mesh. Depending on what I need it for I sometimes go to edit mode, select just the tips and using proportional editing I thin them out a bit. Then I simply bake my normal map
