HairTG-Cards 2

Hair Procedurals For Artists

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Hair Procedurals For Artists

HairTG-Cards 2 provides a complete workflow for the creation of card-based hair/fur models, using procedural and artist friendly solutions covering both the hair material and card geometry generation, integrated with popular tools Substance 3D Painter and Blender.

Procedural & Artist Friendly - HairTG-Cards 2 brings the power of procedural generation tailored to artists needs, choose the right amount of automated generation for your workflow and have full control over the result.
Fully Dynamic - Both the hair material and cards are generated procedurally, which implies resolution independence, non-destructive workflow and randomization of properties.
Hair Material Design - A powerful set of hair material features and presets into Painter to make a variety of hair styles, including hundreds of parameters, extensive coloring options and more.

Hair card geometry from curves - HairTG-Cards leverages the Blender hair curves system to turn them into cards with plenty of options such as dynamic polygon count, card tilt and Auto-Tilt to face the model, UV mapping etc. Compatible with Blender hair tools including Geometry Nodes.
Global and Local Properties - Both the hair material and card geometry management include global and local properties, enabling to make global changes to the whole card set or local modifications to specific areas and designs.
Design Presets - HairTG-Cards includes dozens of high quality artist designed hair presets, covering various styles, all editable.

Dynamic Material - In Blender and supporting hosts, a dynamic version of the hair material lets you experiment with various variations, acting on the waviness, coloring, hair density, combing, thickness and many more. In Painter the hair material may also be fully edited procedurally on the character model.
Learning Material - Provided with 7+ hours of tutorial videos covering the complete creation of a hair model as well as detailed User Manuals for both the texturing and modeling sides.
HairTG-Cards Pro - Includes the regular HairTG-Cards content plus specific components for Substance 3D Designer, enabling to create custom hair components.

Hair Texturing in Painter

HairTG-Cards seamlessly integrates into Substance 3D Painter using a plugin and dedicated Substances. This is where the initial hair design material takes place, before moving on to Blender for the hair model creation. Once the latter is complete, the hair model along with supporting character may be brought into Painter where the hair material edition may resume, with the complete set of procedural tools as used during the initial design.

Even though the recommended HairTG-Cards workflow uses both Painter and Blender, each environment is handled independently and may be subtituted by a third party tool without impacting the other.

Setting Up A Texturing Project in Painter

From the Project Setup view a new hair card project may be set up in seconds. Project Setup automatically creates the required Texture Set channels, a configurable number of rows/columns for cards and the usage of predefined design sets. The Preset Browser lets you choose between dozens of high quality designs presets, themselves available in hundreds of variations. The Rendering Options view centralizes the main rendering properties and profiles for a quick setup whether working on the designs or readying them for export.

Project Setup

The Project Setup view prepares the Texture Set channels for HairTG-Cards and creates startup card layers with a configurable amount of columns and rows. It may also create layers from pre-designed Design Sets so users may start from an already fully populated design set and edit it.

Preset Browser

HairTG-Cards comes with dozens of hair design presets covering a wide range of hair styles. Users may pick one as startup and edit its parameters to create their own. Each preset is a starting point and includes hundreds of variations of similar designs selectable within Painter. The dedicated Preset Browser view includes filters covering major hair styles, preview thumbnails of various sizes and tag search.

Rendering Options

Rendering Options enable to select the output maps to generate, one of the two available renderers (Performance and Complete), Rendering Profiles and various options, all gathered into a single view.

Toolbar

The HairTG-Cards toolbar provides many functionalities from a single click: focus/unfocus on a design within a set, previous/next random variation, design generation sizing operations (fit height etc.), transforms, control point selectors etc.

Material Edition

Texture designs are made in Painter using two Substances: one HTC-Card per layer representing a design unit and the HTC-Controller defining common properties and modifiers for all the cards. Hundreds of parameters are available to create a wide amount of designs. The following material maps are available: Opacity, ID, Height, Basecolor, Normal, Flow, Anisotropy Angle, Anisotropy Level, Roughness, Root, Tip.

Design Edition

The HTC-Card Substance provides a complete set of parameters to procedurally generate various hair or fur texture styles, including straight, long, short, wide, stray, wavy, curly hair etc. Decoupling hair components in strands and threads, users may shape their hair style precisely using Control Points and hundreds of hair attributes. A Focus Mode enables to isolate a design in full scale to ease editing into a design set.

Transforms

Painter native Transform tools may be used to layout the hair designs into the texture space (position, scale, rotation). The HairTG-Cards toolbar also provides Transform Tools which may be applied to multiple card layers at once.

The Controller

The HTC Controller Substance controls several card designs at a time to set them up with common parameters (map properties, colors, hair thickness etc.) and dozens of modifiers. For example adding waves to all the designs at once can be made from the HTC Controller.

The Workshop

The Workshop is a powerful tool enabling to create progressions between designs along several properties. Create a set of related designs in a few seconds using a simple set of rules including properties, operators and target values.

Design With Progressions

The Workshop enables to create progressions between designs, to morph some aspects of one design into another along selected parameters. Create a set of designs with decreasing hair density and/or shorter length in a few clicks.

Shape Morphing

The Workshop enables to morph the shape of one design into another, generating all the intermediate shapes. This is a way to pick optimal shapes between two designs of choice for further use.

Coloring

Multiple coloring modes are available to generate the Basecolor map: uniform color, result from map blending, per-hair coloring from internal or external color sources, color presets and palettes, predefined or custom. Coloring options also enable to add intermediate tints to hair such as a variable level of grey hair (or other tint) as well as coloring or darkening the root and/or tip of the hair.

Extensive coloring options

HairTG-Cards features several coloring modes and options, including using a tint or darkening the root/tip of the hair, combining maps (Blend Maps), color palettes, mixing tints, baked lighting and generating colors per hair using a color source.

Mixed Tint

Mixed Tint enables to generate a variable percentage of hair with a different range of tints than the main hair color. This may be used to add grey hair to a model for example.

Tip/Root Tint

The root and tip of the hair may use a tint color of variable length (determined by the Tip and Root map settings). Per-hair randomness also makes hair tint applied with variable length per hair.

Blend Maps

The Basecolor map may result in a blend between the Depth or the ID map and a color source, using various blend modes. This opens many possibilities, from boosting contrast to subltle tint variations.

External Color Sources

Using external color sources enables fine control over they way the hair are colored all along their length. HairTG-Cards enables to tailor a portion of the color source to generate hair colors from, but also to assign color ranges per hair components, for example hair threads.

Exports From Painter

HairTG-Cards features 3 types of exports from Painter:

Textures - The hair material may be exported as regular textures. HairTG-Cards provides a dedicated view for this, simplifying the native export procedure of Painter. The Export view also automatically switches rendering parameters to optimal quality for export and restores the original settings after export.
Dynamic Design Set - A specific texture containing only parameters to be used by Card Set Player Substances into supporting hosts such as Blender. This enables usage of a Dynamic Material into third party hosts where many original properties of the material may be edited.
Design Set Params - Design Set Params are saved as a text file and describe an HairTG-Cards layer set structure inside Painter, including folders, card layers and their layout. They may be exported from one project and imported into one another, without including binary dependencies as would the the case using Smart Materials. They may be used to build Design Set Presets available from the Project Setup as well as to rebuild a layer structure when bringing the hair model (with optional character) into Painter so the hair material may be edited on it.

Texture Export

Textures forming the hair material may be exported from a dedicated Export window, combining the essential export parameters in a simplified view so the native Painter export procedure is not required. Moreover, the HairTG-Cards Export view automatically configures rendering parameters to high quality export mode and restores the original parameters when export is complete.

Dynamic Design Set Export

HairTG-Cards enable to export a specific texture containing design set parameters and layout information, which may be used by a Card Set Player Substance in supporting hosts such as Blender. This enables to edit further many material properties into Blender, such as hair waviness, thickness, length, combing and most of the coloring options available in Painter.

Design Set Params Import/Export

The card layers and folder sturcture used for a design set may be exported as a text file, eliminating all binary dependencies an equivalent Smart Material may have. They may then be shared across projects using the same design set, as well as Design Set Presets for Project Setup. They are also used to generate a layer stucture into a project containing the hair model so its material may be edited with full flexibility directly on the hair/character model in Painter.

Hair Modeling in Blender

In the HairTG-Cards workflow, Blender is where the hair model is created, using the native Blender hair tools supplemented by the HairTG-Cards Add-On and a set of Geometry Nodes based Modifiers to turn hair curves into cards and perform the UV Mapping. No need to know how to program Geometry Nodes to use HairTG-Cards, those provided are fully usable as regular Modifiers.

UV Mapping

Creating hair card UV Mappings takes only a few minutes with the HairTG-Cards Add-On and Modifier tools. With visual feedback in both the UV Editing and 3D views, use helpers to assign UV Mapping to whole rows of cards at once. Once determined, the UV parameters are shared by all the HairTG-Cards components in Blender. Save the UV parameters to file for backup to share them accross projects.

UV Mapping

Thanks to the HairTG-Cards Add-On and a dedicated Modifier, creating the UV Mapping for hair cards is much simplified and fast, with visual feedback both in the 3D and the UV Editing views, using helpers to assign multiple UV parameters at a time. The obtained UV parameters in the Add-On are shared between all HairTG-Cards Modifiers, including those generating cards for the hair model. They may also be saved to file and imported into another project.

Curves to cards

HairTG-Cards leverages the Blender hair system, providing a Geometry Nodes based Modifier named HTC-To Cards enabling to generate cards from hair curves. All the regular Blender hair tools may be used, including Geometry Nodes, to generate and comb the curves. Then the HTC-To Cards Modifier generates a configurable number of cards from a set of curves. Many options are provided for the generation of these cards, such as dynamic resolution, texture design selection, tilt options etc. Moreover, the HairTG-Cards Add-On controls all the HTC-To Cards Modifiers at once enabling to set global settings to all of them.

Curves To Cards

The HTC-To Cards Modifier generates cards from a group of hair curves. Several of these Modifiers may be used to realize the full hair model, each of them using local properties but also inheriting global ones from the HairTG-Cards Add-On.

Hair Layers

HairTG-Cards is fully compatible with the layered hair workflow as demonstrated in the included tutorial videos covering the entire realization of a hair model. Thanks to the modularity of the HTC-To Cards Modifier, groups of hair curves may be assembled to form layers, each of them using global and local properties.

A Layered Workflow

The layered approach demonstrated in the HairTG-Cards Tutorial Videos enables to build a hair model slice by slice, increasing realism at every layer.

Auto-Tilt

In some cases, especially for lower level layers, hair cards need to be oriented towards the support (head or body mesh), which is a tideous process to handle manually. HairTG-Cards provides the Auto-Tilt feature, making cards face the support all along their length or partially, with configurable transition length between the Auto-Tilted and non Auto-Tilted areas. The non Auto-Tilted section has its own tilt (rotation) value as well as an optional tilt randomness per card, so they don't look flat regardless of the angle they are viewed from.

Auto-Tilt to orient cards towards support

Using Auto-Tilt, cards face the head mesh on part or all of their length, with configurable transition. This enormously speeds up the creation of lower layers of cards so they cover a maximum amount of surface with a minimum number of cards.

Variable Length Auto-Tilt

Auto-Tilt, when enabled, starts from the root of the card with a configurable length, then transitions to regular tilt with optional tilt randomness per card. The configurable transition length controls how smooth or sharp the orientation moves from one tilt to the other.

Dynamic Card Resolution

The HairTG-Cards Add-On enables to dynamically update the resolution of all the hair card Modifiers at once so you may adapt a hair model to a polygon count target by only moving a slider, in realtime. The HTC-To Cards Modifiers may use a relative or fixed resolution, making parts of the model use a lower resolution (less visible areas) or higher resolution (protruding areas) than the global one. Resolution may be further optimized by controlling the distribution of edges along cards to favor curvy areas over straight ones.

Adaptive Polygon Count

The HairTG-Cards Add-On enables to dynamically update the resolution of all the hair card generation Modifiers so you may adapt a hair model to your polygon count target by only moving a slider, in realtime.

Variable Resolution

Variable Resolution enables to distribute edges along the length of cards in a way to increase their numbers in curvy areas and reduce it in straighter ones. This way the hair model appears smoother without increasing the polygon count. HairTG-Cards provides Automatic and Manual modes to handle Variable Resolution.

Adaptive Edge Distribution

Variable Resolution adapts to the card's curvature, increasing the number of edges in curvy areas and reducing it in straighter ones, without increasing the overall polygon count. Each HTC-To Cards Modifier may use different settings for different groups of cards function of their role and positionning.

Auto and Manual modes

Variable Resolution has an Automatic mode, where the Modifier distributes edges function of the hair card curvature. For further tweaking, a Manual mode is also available providing more control over the distribution.

Hair Curve Selection

HairTG-Cards may select the input hair curves to use for card generation, enabling to produce ligthweight hair card models from heavier curve-based hair models. Card selection may be done either from the HTC-To Cards Modifier, or using a specific Modifier before entering HTC-To Cards which will turn curves into cards.

Simplify a Curve-based Hair Model Using Curve Selection

Input hair curves may be randomly selected up to a configurable percentage, enabling to obtain a target polygon count even from heavy curve-based models. Changing a random seed changes the curve selection enabling to select a suitable layout

Dynamic Material in Blender and Painter

Procedural Material in Supporting Hosts

HairTG-Cards generates hair material both in the traditional form of texture sets, but also optionally in a dynamic way (Dynamic Design Set) which may be used through a Card Set Player Substance into supporting hosts, including Blender and Painter. Using the Card Set Player, many properties of the hair material may be edited procedurally, such as hair waviness, density, length, combing, thickness, coloring and others. This enables to test various hair configurations without leaving the work environment used to develop the character model.

The Card Set Player Substance enables to control material parameters both globally, affecting all the hair designs, or on a per-design basis. The below illustrations are using a Card Set Player in Blender through the Substance 3D Add-On for Blender.

Dynamic Material - Waviness

Hair waves may be increased or decreased both globally and on a per-design basis. Various waving parameters are available, including mixing wavy and less wavy hair.

Slight Wave

Slight waves have been produced through the Dynamic Material.

Wavy

The material here is wavier. It is possible to reduce waving at the root or tip of the hair.

Mixed

Mixed waving includes both wavy and less wavy hair in the same material.

Dynamic Material - Hair Length

Using a Dynamic Material, hair length may be controlled at the material level. It may also be controlled at the geometry level (length of cards) in Blender through the HTC-To Cards Modifier. Regarding the material, hair length may be reduced globally or made random with control of discrepancies between long and short hair.

Original Length

The hair at their original length.

Shorter Length

The base length of all the hair in material has been reduced.

Random Length

Hair in material get random lengths between their original length and a shorter one, how much shorter depends on the randomness factor.

Dynamic Material - Hair Thickness

The Dynamic Material makes it possible to test various hair thicknesses on the character model to fit a specific style.

Thin Hair

The hair at their original thickness.

Thick Hair

Hair thickness increased.

Very Thick Hair

Very thick stylized hair.

Dynamic Material - Combing

Hair combing may be altered at the material level through the Combing parameters of strands and threads and the properties of stray hair including their amount and stray strength.

Combed Hair

The hair in a combed state at the material level.

Increased Disorder

Reducing the combing factor and increasing stray hair in threads makes the hair uncombed at the material level.

Dynamic Material - Coloring

Dynamic Material enables extended coloring options in Blender or Painter without leaving the host application. Coloring can be performed per-hair and includes color presets, root/tip tint/darkening, addition of mixed tints including grey hair, per-hair coloring from an external color source.

Root Tint

The hair may use a tint starting from the root, of configurable length and blend modes, with optional length randomness per hair.

External Color Source

An external color source may be used to handle coloring per hair. This way complex color variations may be performed all along the hair length and assigned per hair component such as threads.

Tip Tint

The tip of the hair may use a specific tint using one of the available blend modes, on a configurable length including randomness.

Mixed Tint

Mixed-Tint enables to add a range of tints to the base color, in a configurable amount, enabling to create subtle tints.

Grey Hair

The addition of a configurable amount of grey hair is one of the usage of the Mixed-Tint feature, using a configurable amount of light/dark grey hair to replace the original hair tint.

And More...

Cards or Tubes - Tube geometry may be generated instead of cards to represent specific types of hair.
Cards From Grease Pencil - Cards may be generated from Grease Pencil curves in addition to regular hair curves.
Configurable Length - Cards may be made shorter than the curves they are built from. Within a group curves/cards handled by an HTC-To Cards Modifier, card length may be randomized with a configurable factor.

Card Width Resolution - Card Resolution is also configurable along their width. Increasing the width resolution enables to curve the cards along their width to unflatten them, or to represent tubes.
UV Flip - Card UVs may be flipped horizontally/vertically, using either global or local settings per HTC-To Cards Modifier. When used locally, mixing horinzontally flipped and non flipped cards may increase visual texture diversity.
Twist - Cards may be twisted along their length so they present various angles from a same viewpoint.

HairTG-Cards Editions

HairTG-Cards is available in 3 editions, please check this document for feature comparisions per edition.

Personal - The Personal Edition of HairTG-Cards is for non-commercial use and contains the main functionalities of the tools but with several limitations.
Regular - This is the main distribution of HairTG-Cards, it has all the features except those of the Pro edition.
Pro - HairTG-Cards Pro includes additional content enabling to create hair components in Substance 3D Designer. The SBS graphs of several components are provided (the core of the hair generators remains in SBSAR form), enabling to customize the Substances used into Painter and Blender, such as the main card material in Painter (HTC-Card), the Controller (HTC-Controller) and the Card Set Players (HTCS-CardSet).

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