There is not way to guide hair in blender 2.8, particle hair api is broken.
But HTool works ok in blender 2.79
There is option to attach curves to as particle hair with ‘Particle hair form curves’
There is not way to guide particle hair directly, but there is option to guide curves. So the workflow would be:
then attach / convert those to particle hair with first tool.
Particle hair can be converted to curves too with this
And then curve ribbons, can be converted to mesh ribbons (and back) with this
So basically you can eg, generate guided curves, attach as particle hair, generate child particlese, convert back to curves, attach back as particle hair (but this time child particles will be attached as ‘main’ particles)
If it wont work to you, you can ask for refund.
There is not way to guide hair in blender 2.8, particle hair api is broken.
Are you sure about that? Since I have used the forcefield > curve guide settings to manipulate hair into a braid shape with no issue in 2.8, as shown below. Maybe a nightly update has fixed it?
I think the particle hair from curves will work for me, all I need to to be able to do is convert my guided and hand edited hair back into guide hairs (they really should disambiguate these terms).
The workflow as I currently see it working is:
Generate hair and guide using curve guide, as in the image.
Bake shape to mesh strings using the convert button.
Edit the mesh strings by hand then convert to curves.
Add curves back as guide hairs for the particle system.
Tweak settings with children to get that special look.
Profit.
Would that or similar work with Hair Tool? If you can’t say for sure, I’ll just buy it and see; it seems like great value on its own merits TBH, I just really want to make this particular thing work in Blender.
Ok, it should work. I don’t actually use curve force field as guides. Usually I use grid mesh for guiding curves (which later can be converted to particle hair).
But then I don’t understand where is the problem? Blender build int curve force field dosen’t work?
Btw for braid there is this: https://joseconseco.github.io/HairToolDocs/Tools/#generate-braid
I could try the grid perhaps, but does it generate hair with depth to it, like a cylinder?
The issue is that I can’t edit the guide hairs after I have used a curve to change the shape. When I try to edit the guide hairs in particle edit after modifying them with the force field, they snap back to the original shape. Ideally I’d like to be able to edit hairs using an easy to control method, like curves, then make smaller edits directly to the guide hairs so I can fit them to the scalp with the right shape.
For some reason you can’t just bake the effect of a forcefield to particle hair, or at least, I couldn’t find a way. So I thought I’d just convert them to curves and add those to a particle effect as guide hairs, but I couldn’t do that either. I tried saving the physics cache which I read somewhere would allow you to edit particle hair in place after forcefields but that also didn’t work.
Hopefully one of the many conversion tools in your addon will solve it, although I may just find an easier workflow than the forcefield one, since it has the annoying side effect of requiring a separate collection for each curve and hair patch. It has some nice advantages though, you can use radius and twist for some fine control.
I’ll have a go with your addon and see if I manage to get a satisfactory workflow.
Yep this can be fixed by converting guided particle hair to mesh, then curve. And In THool you can attach those baked curves, back to original particle hair syste - with ability to edit them (they won’t snap back to original position).
Again in blender 2.8 baking curve to Particle Hair won’t work, with Htool, due to error in blender python API.
I had a chance to try the workflow this morning, and I don’t think it’s working as intended.
When I hit hair from curves, it seems to work perfectly, but any edit, such as a translate of the hair object or trying to go into particle edit mode results in the baked shape resetting as below. I’m on 1.9.7 on blender 2.79b. Surely it is supposed to bake to hair I can then edit? Perhaps I’m doing something incorrectly, but some functions seem to work, like adding children. The resetting also occurs when I move it to 2.8 too, alas.
I got a problem when I want to style the particle hair in the baking scene: if I use the comb brush, the particles are actually strecthing (meaning that the length of the hair isn’t locked).It also happens when I create a new mesh with new hair particle system. Any idea?
Thanks
PS: I’m using the latest version on the latest blender build.
I’m trying to use Particle Hair from Curves in 2.0.8 in Blender 2.8. I select my curves, then my mesh and hit Particle Hair from Curves. It gives me the following error. It does create a particle system, but the particles are all weird lengths and placement. Is this just a bug, or is there something else I have to do to have it work? I’ve tried with both bezier and poly splines.
I cant fixt that yet. Blender api for particle hair is still broken. I can only hope it will be fixed for finall 2.8 release.
You may need to use blender 2.79 for that - latest HT build for blender 2.79 is - 1.9.8 (contains small fix to ‘Particle Hair from curves’)
I got a bunch of hair planes this (like a hundred on them) from Maya and would like to use Hair Tool to convert them to ribbons to manipulate. The topology of it is very similar to mesh ribbons, is there anyway for the conversion to work?
I just tried convert a curve to curve ribbon, but when I try to use curve resample, Blender crash (2.79), and simplify curve gives me error, why wouldn’t those functions work on curve ribbon created from curve? Edit: I found out that they works not on Bezier but Poly Spline Type.
(Sorry to cross post, I just got a hair grooming job (polygon hair and using Maya) and hope Hair Tool can help me works with existing polygon hairs)
Most time consuming may be selecting first loop and marking it as sharp. It will become the roots of curves. I you have uv’s then it may be usefull to use it for selection of first loop like shown in video above (using uv selection sync)
Thank you! Thank you! @mem and @JoseConseco who took the time to make video and for the speedy response, I am really excited that it’s possible to convert existing polygon hairs!
JoseConseco method work better in my case because I can use the “Align tilt” option when I convert the curves to ribbons. Since mem’s method remove all edges and left the middle one, when converting them to ribbons, I will have to tilt the curves manually for each of them if I want them to look as close to the original. Still, mem’s way really looks like witch craft! really nice trick to using Select Similar!
I am gonna play with this more and I probably will have many other questions coming, glad to see we have such great support from user and creator.
