Research Project: Blender Hair Tool 3

 Blender Hair Tool 3:

Open Blender.

Once you have the Add-on installed you will find it here to the side.

Add a plane with a Simple SubDiv Modifier

Shape the plane into the shape you want your hair to look like, marking the root of the hair as sharp and creased.

Use the hot key Ctrl-Shift-H to bring up the Hair menu and click "Curves from Grid Surface".

Change the count of the strands to fit the size of the mesh you are working with and make sure there is enough subdivision levels for them to form smooth curves.

Layout the rest of your planes in the way your hair to fall

To finalize your hair for import to unreal, click "convert hair to mesh".

This will change your hair into planes with real geometry that you can export like normal into Unreal.

You can change the color of your hair through the material tab on the right-hand side of the screen.

Check your hair in the material preview view mode - you will find the button in the top right of the screen.

In order to bake the textures to the hair cards, we need to bake them inside Blender before they can be exported. After saving your blender file, click "Import Baking Scene" to start the baking process.

Your workspace will load the baking scene as shown. 

Select the maps you want to bake - I recommend the ones in blue above - then click "Bake Hair." Don't be alarmed if Blender says it's not responding while baking, the process takes a while, just keep the program open and go grab a cup of coffee.

Once your maps are baked, you'll find them in the folder set by the "Path" slot on the baking menu.

Open Unreal Engine.

Import the baked textures to Unreal Engine and start a new material

Connect your textures to the Material Graph like shown. Be sure to make sure set the material to "Double Sided" and set the blend mode to "Masked"

Place your material on your mesh and voila! You now have hair cards in Unreal Engine!