I need do make old school hair/fur using hair/fur cards (non-manifold mesh with masked alpha texture). Making cards isn’t the problem. The problem is how to place the cards on the mesh. I was thinking it needs to be some kind of scattering technique or particles, which I need to turn into mesh once they are distributed over the mesh.
How do I do that (placing hair/fur cards on the mesh)? Thanks
I would use a hair particle system (the old one, not geometry nodes). I would go into particle edit to place and comb the individual hairs, then use the particle instance modifier: it can put the cards on the particles, it can even make the cards curve if they have the loop cuts for it.
Then, I maintain my answer and what I said is what I would personally do. Is this process completely unfamiliar to you?
I can explain the basics of the particle hair if you need.
1- We start by putting a particle system on an object and setting it to hair.
2- Now that there is hair, you will have access to the particle edit mode.
3- In particle edit, I use the cut tool to completely remove and reset the hair to nothing as a starting point.
4- I then use the add tool to manually put each hair where I want it. I set the count to 1 so I can place the hairs individually. We don’t want too much density, as each hair will become a wider card.
5- I use the comb and puff tools to put the hair into the desired shape. If you struggle combing part of the body without affecting other parts, you could use separate hair systems for different body parts and comb each separately.
6- Use the particle instance modifier like in the tutorial I posted to place cards on the hairs.
7- If you need denser hair, activate “children” in the particle settings and adjust their number and radius. This is going to turn every hair you have placed into a clump of multiple. For cards, you might want to keep the number low. Also, you need to check “children” on the particle instance modifier, or they won’t be used.
8- If you need to export the result, you will have to apply the particle instance modifier, then use weight transfer to make the hair follow the rigging of the creature.
Yeah. I usually model/texture/animate in Blender. Never really touched anything else 
Thanks for the breakdown, I’ll give it a spin