All the ways I’ve seen online seem to be workarounds, but this allows for an actual hair mesh to be baked. No guesswork with extrudes, no rendering with a special camera setup.
I don’t know if it’d work in older versions, but it works on 2.6.9.
The steps are fairly straightforward and I don’t think it needs pictures, so here goes!
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Work on your hair/fur exactly like you usually would, make sure your “view” children count is what you want to bake later on.
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Once you’re satisfied, convert it in the modifiers section.
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Use a skin modifier on the resulting mesh, enter edit mode, select all then Ctrl+A to .005 or something small for the thickness, and click “mark root” in the skin modifier with everything still selected.
You’re done! You might want to do a limited dissolve on the resulting mesh, change it to the hair material, set to smooth, etc. But now you have mesh hair for all your baking purposes! It’s quite high poly but it’s clean, and easy to recreate without any guesswork.
Enjoy!
Edit : I know this is some of the worst looking hair, but I ran a render test last night, here’s the result: poly hair made using this method with a very quickly done lighting and material. Took me 5 minutes (and 2.5h to render)… Anyways, you get the idea, it looks like hair.
