FiberBake Addon

FiberBake is a Blender addon for artists who need to produce hair cards: textured planes used to represent hair in game engines and real-time rendering.

It covers the full self-contained workflow: from procedural strand creation with Geometry Nodes, through baking every texture you need (color, normal, opacity, ambient occlusion, roughness, and more), to previewing and exporting the result. A post-bake step, Groom Hair Cards, turns the exported OBJ and textures into a finished, groomable hairstyle inside your character scene, which you convert to a single mesh and export as FBX.

All bake work happens inside a dedicated workspace called FiberBake, with its own scene, orthographic camera, and a render setup prepared for clean, repeatable results, so you do not have to rebuild that environment by hand.

The two halves are a loop, not a one-way street. You never have to plan a fixed atlas up front: bake one strand, place it in the groom, and let the live result tell you what is still missing. Jump back, bake a new strand, reshape one that is not sitting right, repack the atlas, and return to the groom with your sculpted layers intact.

• Create strandsGenerate procedural strands from built-in Geometry Nodes style templates.
• Shape the strandEdit the card shape, length and radius with the built-in controls, and stack effect modifiers: Curve Length, Frizz, Noise, Curl, Clump, Braid.
• Manage materialsA hair material library with color templates, root-to-tip gradient, global hue, Random Thread Color, Highlight Color and Surface (Roughness / Specular), all per-material, so strands sharing the same material share the same look.
• Save presetsStore and reuse your strand and material setups across scenes and projects.
• Bake texture setsGenerate up to 12 maps including Color, Opacity, Normal, Roughness, Specular, AO, Flow Map and ID.
• Work in lots and exportKeep several named bake lots in memory and export the chosen set, with per-pass bit depth, channel packing for combined maps like ORM, and optionally the aligned OBJ planes.
• Groom Hair CardsImport the exported OBJ, auto-build the PBR material, then groom the cards directly onto a head or emitter as sculptable layers, each with its own per-layer effect stack (width profile, duplicate / interpolate / delete cards, resample, trim, shrinkwrap and more), and bake them into one mesh to export as FBX.
• Groom on a base headTwo real-scale base heads and a genderless scalp cap ship with the addon, so you can groom without modelling a character first. Or pick any mesh of your own as the emitter (it must have a UV map, since the cards attach to the surface through it; the bundled heads already do).
• Stay inside a budgetA live Cards / Verts / Tris readout in the viewport, with a triangle budget you set, counting the real generated geometry.
• Present the resultA studio HDRI in one click, with rotation, intensity and saturation, plus Holdout and Shadow Catcher toggles for portfolio renders of the groom.

• No hair simulationThe cards are static, authored hair for real-time and game characters. There is no physics groom and no render-time strand system.
• No third-party card importThe grooming is built around the cards FiberBake bakes, whose UVs match the atlas exactly. It is not a generic importer for hair card sheets made elsewhere.
• Limited geometry export formatsGeometry exports as OBJ (the bake's card planes) or FBX (the finished hair mesh) only, not glTF, USD or other formats.

All buttons, sliders and fields in the panel include informative tooltips. Hover a control for a moment to see a quick explanation. The strand's Geometry Nodes controls are drawn dynamically from the node group, so the tooltip of each socket is always the most reliable reference for its exact behavior.