Mesh to hair particles?

I have a fantasy creature model with hair as a mesh and I want to make hair as a hair particles. The easiest way (hell no) is seems to just manually comb hair and use hair mesh as a guide. But it’s very hard and almost impossible to match hair shape. So how else can I do it?
I’ve tried to use curve guides, but it’s buggy and twisting a hair (I’ve already asked here about it and haven’t got correct answer). Also, I came across interesting plugin HairNet which is perfectly matches my goal, but unfortunately it’s not working in 2.8/2.79 and I’m not sure if I can transfer hair between projects without loosing shape