HairTG-Cards 2 Early Access is now available (free update for all licenses of HairTG-Cards 1 except Mini)! Check out the numerous enhancements for Painter and Blender including automated project setup, new design tools, preset browser, automated export, Card Sets, new geometry tools for Blender and more! A two-part video presents an overview of the texturing and modeling tools so you can get started right away!

In Substance 3D Painter:

• Project Setup: automatic creation of Texture Set settings and layer stack elements for HairTG-Cards, including initial cards.
• Workshop enabling to create design progressions, such as varying hair density, hair length etc. among a set of cards. This way design properties may be progressively varied based on progression descriptions. This is a powerful feature enabling to quickly create card sets.
• A Rendering window to control the main rendering parameters of all the cards.
• Export automatically setting up the cards with the best rendering options and exporting them. No need to use the Export interface of Painter, this new window automates all the export procedure.
• Card presets and Preset Browser to easily navigate between presets.
• Automatic layout of cards in rows on one or two columns, initial creation of cards when setting up a project.
• Toolbars to ease access to various functionalities such as positioning/sizing/centering the cards, controlling overlays etc.
• A Focus functionality enabling to work on a specific card in full size while the card has already been laid out with others.
• Ability to export Card Set data describing a set of cards with all their characteristics and use this Card Set dynamically (i.e. with the ability to modify card designs) into other hosts such as Blender.

In Blender 4.1/4.2:

Completely new modeling tools based on the Blender's new hair system. They are made of both an add-on and specific Geometry Nodes used as modifiers (no knowledge of geometry nodes needed). The tools enable to UV the cards and transform Blender hair curves into hair cards with dynamic geometry properties. Main features are:

• Generate hair or fur card geometry of custom resolution (along width and length) on the top of Blender's new hair curves. All the Blender specific hair modifiers can be used. The hair card resolution and amount can be modified dynamically.
• Automatic orientation of the cards to face the head/body mesh, with additional custom and random tilt.
• Prevention of hair curves going through head/body mesh.
• Puff/Twist hair, variable card length.
• Handling of global and local hair properties: some hair properties apply to all the hair modifiers while each part can override these properties.
• Compabitle with Alembic hair: import the Alembic file into Blender and generate cards models from it.
• Compatible with HairTG-Cards Card Sets using the Substance 3D add-on: Card Sets can be loaded the hair material modified dynamically (i.e. change hair thickness, density, add curls etc.)

...and more!

To get HairTG-Cards 2 Early Access, just go to the store where you made your purchase of HairTG-Cards 1 and get to the file download section. If you don't own an HairTG-Cards license yet, you may get one here.

HairTG-Cards 2 Early Access is not the final release of HairTG-Cards 2 but an advanced preview with the main new features in, it replaces the alpha testing planned earlier. I hope you'll like it, let us know! Requirements are Substance 3D Painter v10 and Blender 4.1 (current versions).

I occasionally get requests for directly usable hair assets in relationship with HairTG - Hair & Fur: 3D artist Maria Zatorska is providing high-quality, low-poly hair assets including hair card based 3D models for Blender and Maya as well as rendered hair textures with their HairTG - Hair & Fur source (SBS). 

If you own HairTG - Hair & Fur, you may edit the procedural textures with Substance Designer in various ways such as modifying the hair density, shape, thickness, random variations, length etc. You may also provide your own color sources including per-hair gradients and generate the textures at resolutions up to 8K. Thanks to high level parameters in the main hair graph, certain modifications can be made very quicly without having to access HairTG - Hair & Fur controls.

Check out Maria's store on Artstation! Her products are also featured on my website.

Check out the IGCD talk of Character Artist Nirmalendu Paul discussing his real-time hair creation workflow. Paul was kind enough to talk about non-destructive procedural hair texture generation using HairTG - Hair & Fur  (from 30:23 on).

After GlobalSearch, since I'm fully into plugin development these days, I thought of another one so ParamCopy is a new plugin for Substance Designer that will let you copy/paste node parameters, store and recall node states and change the random seeds of multiple nodes at a time.  The video overview below will let you know how it works and what it can do. 

The plugin is available on Artstation and Gumroad. Substance Designer 2019.2 or above is required.

Here are a few example use cases:

• Copy common node Base parameters such as resolution or bit-depth from one node into multiple other nodes.
• Copy specific node parameters into other nodes of the same type, i.e. to uniformize a distribution, layout or processing between multiple nodes.
• Change the inheritance methods of some parameters by changing them into a source node and pasting into other nodes.
• Create multiple variations of a selected set of nodes then switch between them for testing different design options. Combine variations with those of other node sets and recall them all at once.
• Create and combine variations for development, testing or demonstration purpose, skim with a few clicks through variations showing multiple states of your Substance and even combine them.
• Copy/paste parameters between custom or third-party Substances of different types but having similar parameters. 
• Shuffle the randomness of parts your graph by rolling the random seeds of a selection of nodes.
• For Hair & Fur users: copy certain properties of a hair texture generator and paste them into other generators of the same set (to be tiled together). For instance:

                 - Move all the Hair & Fur instances of a tile set from performance efficient pattern settings (beam/dynamic size) to rendering settings (hemisphere/no dynamic size).

                 - Echo the change of hair density from one Hair & Fur instance to all the others.

                 - Replicate fast tiling settings (tiling of exported texture maps) from a Tiler instance to a Global Timer instance.

Note to Hair & Fur users: the next version of Hair & Fur will have a functionality to copy/paste tiling parameters between Tiler instances. It will be limited to Tiler instances only (Tiler Grayscale/Color and Global Tiler) so if you're after this functionality only, no need to get ParamCopy, unless you need the ability to copy/paste params between Hair & Fur instances and variation storage/recalling.

Have fun with ParamCopy and be sure to let me know of any issue or additional features you'd like to have!

Hair & Fur is out (!), this is the new name of the Hair Clump Tool, in its 2.0 version. Same code base, but many things have been added and updated. This 2.0 update is a free upgrade to current users of the Hair Clump Tool. In the previous development update I mentioned the new version would mainly be about waves/curls, and it indeed is, but since then were also added braids, colorization and a new tiling component (Global Tiler) which greatly simplifies the tiling graph. Things have also been improved for accessibility: samples, templates, presets, 3 user interface display levels so users can learn new parameters at their own pace, a major user manual overhaul with illustrations, Getting Started section covering typical modifications to a sample design, tips on creating various hair styles and a review of all components and parameters.

For reference, HairTG - Hair & Fur is a procedural hair/fur texture generator running on Substance Designer whose textures can be used for hair cards , brushes and 2D hair works. HairTG - Strand is a free, limited version showing some of the features of the tool. Hair & Fur is available at the following stores:

• Gumroad
• Artstation
• Cubebrush
• FlippedNormals

As a note to those non familiar with Substance Designer, Hair & Fur is usable with very little knowledge of it. My recommendation is to:

1. Watch the Substance Designer UI Basics video series on Substance Academy.
2. Follow the Getting Started section of the Hair & Fur User Manual.
3. Open the samples, load presets provided with the package and examine them, tweak parameters etc.

After these 3 steps, you should be all set and ready to use Hair & Fur for your own designs.

Here's a list of the main new features in 2.0, there are also many other changes not mentioned here, the release notes have the details.

Main new features in Hair & Fur 2.0

• Three parameter display modes, Basic, Limited and Full Controls enabling users to progressively get familiar with the functionalities.
• Samples (full example designs), Templates (start-up files) and Presets (set of parameters to start up on various designs) to ease learning and start quickly on a given design.
• A powerful Modulation section enabling creation of various types of curly hair. Sine and triangle based modulations are available, frequency and amplitude settings including randomization options, frequency modulation, amplitude random and fade, multiple types of sine-based modulations, low modulation strands etc.
• Related Strands, a sub-section of Modulation, used to correlate hair strand groups in a predefined way. This enables the creation of braids and cordage.
• Subdivision strands: a new type of strand generation enabling to thicken and group hair strands. Stray strands can also be generated going out of the subdivision group for more realism.
• Colorization: two colorization modes, Group and Length which can be used independently or combined using various blend modes. Group Colorization assigns colors per hair groups (multiple grouping organizations are available) while Length Colorization colorizes strands from root to tip. Colorization and transparency can also be driven by depth.
• Depth Profile management is now handled as an independent Substance, leaving users the possibility to modify depth profile textures before passing them to Hair & Fur.
• Four default patterns and dynamic pattern sizing enabling to reduce the iteration count and drive various effects such as fluff.
• Global Tiler, a tiling Substance enabling to tile every map of all hair clumps at once.
• The ID map is now a color output and supports both grayscale and color ID maps.
• The Gradient Ramp map has now a dedicated output, it is not necessary to derive it from the Mask output anymore.
• The Utility output can now display any map with an optional overlay showing control point locations (control point overlay requires usage of a single parent strand).
• User Manual update, easier to get into for new users with Getting Started section, design guides and illustrations.

HairTG - Strand will be updated with the new core shortly.

Hair & Fur will continue to evolve over the coming months so stay tuned!