TEXTURING MAIN FEATURES (Substance Designer)

• Create various hair style textures, straight hair, wavy, curly and braids as well as designs not related to hair, suitable for 2D and 3D applications in particular hair/fur cards.
• Templates (startup files), Samples (design examples) and Presets (predefined Substance parameters) for quick start ups.
• A User Manual guiding you through the parameters and usages. A Getting Started section will have you set up with a hair design even if you are new to Substance Designer.
• Three user interface display modes: Basic, Limited and Full controls, enabling users to progressively learn about the various parameters of the tools.
• Outputs Mask, Alpha, ID (grayscale and color), Depth, Flow, Gradient Ramp (Root map) and Color maps which can be tiled into global textures with provided tiling components. Normal/Ambient Occlusion maps may be derived from the Depth map if needed. 16 bits outputs for Depth/Alpha/ID maps.
• Automatic variation generation by simply changing a randomness setting.
• Two colorization modes, Group and Length provide hair coloring per hair group and along the hair length.
• Support for up to 10 parent hair strands from which an unlimited(*) number of child strands can be generated, globally or per parent strand. Parent strands can be individually positioned and rotated within the clump along with their related strands.
• Up to 10 vertical control points from which strands can be curved and manipulated in various ways (taper, spread, rotate etc.).
• Subdivisions provide grouping abilities, they are unlimited(*) strands each parent or child strand can generate to thicken hair sections. Parameters to create stray strands are also provided.
• Freestyle mode enables placement of control points directly on the 2D view to create the most curvy shapes. It also supports “infinite hair” joining hair root and tip to design hair bun cards.
• Combiner lets you combine multiple hair designs to create a new one, automatically blending the maps of each design.
• Tiler (per map type) and Global Tiler (all maps) take hair clump maps and positions them into composite textures ready to be used in game engine, 3D modelers or renderers. Tiling graphs can be automatically created using a dedicated plugin, also enabling to copy parameters between Tiler instances.
• Hair clumps can be resized without altering the strand thickness, letting users going back to an earlier design and adjust it so it fits in the overall design of a set of clumps.
• Hair strand thickness control independently at root and tip, with midpoint and three variation types.
• Independent, automatic depth profile generation, modifiable with Substance Designer nodes before plugging into he hair generator.
• Hair strand length controls in various ways including random factors.
• A powerful modulation section to create wavy, curly hair and braids, but also cordage and other types of creative designs.
• Child hair strands combing for the whole clump or partially.
• Support for automatic and user-provided depth profiles (to generate the Depth map). Depth profile management can be refined by user defined nodes. Depth profiles can be visualized as curves.
• Root and tip fade effects application to several maps.
• Strand thickness for Mask and related maps can be adjusted.
• Four default patterns and possibility to use custom patterns, grayscale or color.
• Various pattern configuration settings: number of iterations, size, dynamic size, automatic rotation, depth control.
• Utility output with optional overlay of control point numbers.

BLENDER ADD-ON MAIN FEATURES

The Blender 2.81a add-on provides several utilities to facilitate hair card creation, UV unwrapping and composition.

• Automatic hair card UV unwrapping based on their position relatively to a reference mesh.
• Random UV horizontal offsets can be generated in order to quickly produce a variety of textured cards using an underlying texture created to that attention.
• Card folding with 3 folding types, Random, Fixed and Curved to provide cards with thickness. Folding can be operated from a flat state or the current folding state enabling combination of folding types. Folding can be reversed and canceled.
• Card combination: sets of 2 or 3 cards can be combined to provide them a better appearance when viewed from different angles. Four combination types are available for 2-card and 3-card sets. Once combined, cards can still be moved/rotated until they are joined into a single mesh.
• Card origin can be set to the card root automatically, either on a single card or a card combination, enabling to create longer or shorter hair with a simple sizing operation.
• Hair card association to particle hair grooming: this powerful feature enables usage of the native Blender 3D hair grooming system to generate hair curves which are then associated to hair cards. Curves can then be edited independently with cards following their paths.
• The Replace Cards function enables to replace a set of cards with another card, even when associated to curves.
• A Finalize tool generates a hair model (single mesh or multiple hair cards meshes) from the card/curve associations.
• A Utility section provides convenience functions to assign/remove materials, duplicate cards without duplicating their material and rename objects in various ways.