Changelog

Every FiberBake release, newest first. The store listing carries the headlines; this page is the detail behind them.

• Cylinder card shapeA cross-section that wraps the card into a tube, for braids, dreads and thick strands. Roundness goes from a full tube to a flattened one, for a strand that has volume but still lies close to the head. Open unrolls the tube towards a flat card, and unlike Roundness it keeps the card's width as it opens, so the texture is never squeezed. The tube's seam sits on the inner side, where it is hidden by the neighbouring strands rather than running down the front of a braid.
• Custom card shapeDraw the cross-section yourself with a curve, instead of picking one of the presets. The curve appears in the Shape panel when you select Custom, with a Reset button to flatten it back. Each layer can have its own curve, or share one with the rest.
• Add Curve, while editing a layerAdds a straight hair curve at the length you set, placed in front of your character instead of at the world origin. It replaces the fiddle of adding Blender's default curve and then straightening, resizing and dragging it out of the head every time.
• Random WidthSits under Card Width and makes some cards thinner than others, so a layer stops reading as a row of identical strips. Zero leaves every card exactly as before, and the seed beside it changes which cards get thinner. Each card keeps one thickness from root to tip, and it stacks with a Width Profile effect rather than replacing it.
• Root FlattenEases the card's shape out towards the root, so a strand lies flat where it meets the head and only takes its shape further down. Useful for braids and dreads, whose roots have to sit against the scalp while the rest reads as a rope. Flatten Length beside it sets how far up the strand that transition reaches. It applies to the shapes built from a single profile (Arch, V, Wave, Custom and Cylinder), and is hidden for the rest.
• TwistA slider in the Tilt panel that rotates each card along its own length, so a card can start flat at the root and turn as it goes. Useful for strands that curl away from the head and to break up cards that all face the same way. It works in every tilt mode and leaves the root where the tilt put it, so cards stay seated on the scalp.
• Mirror effectCopies a layer's curves to the other side of the head, so a hairstyle only has to be groomed once. It is a normal effect, so it stays live while you work: keep grooming one side and the other follows. Cards on the mirrored side lean and twist the opposite way, as a real reflection does, rather than repeating the same angle. Apply it when you want both halves as real curves you can groom apart, and the new half re-attaches itself to the head so it still follows the character.
• Reduce HairCardsTakes a layer with more cards than you need down to the ones that matter, keeping the shape of the hairstyle instead of leaving it moth-eaten. Useful after Interpolate, or on any dense groom. Spacing sets how much it thins: 1 barely touches the layer, 3 keeps about a third, 6 keeps a tenth, and the same value works on any character whatever its scale. Along Curve trades one thing for the other: low spreads the cards evenly over the scalp, high keeps the volume and silhouette of the hairstyle. The old random thinner is still there, now called Random Delete.
• Layer colorsGive every layer its own color in the viewport to tell them apart while grooming. Works in Solid, so it costs nothing in performance. The colors show in the layer list too, and you can change any of them by hand.
• ID viewSee the cards wearing the baked ID pass instead of their color, to check at a glance which strand of the atlas each card is using and spot repetition. Needs the ID pass baked, and turns itself off before converting or exporting so it can never ship as the hair color.
• Update Node GroupsA .blend keeps its own copy of the node groups it was built with, so a project made with an earlier version would not have the new card shapes, no matter how up to date the add-on is. Open such a project and About now says so, with a button that brings its groups up to date. Your settings and hand-drawn curves are kept: they live on the modifiers, not in the groups.

• Wireframe shows only the cardsThe wireframe button now works on the hair layers alone. Before it used the viewport-wide overlay, which also drew the emitter's mesh and buried the cards you were trying to look at.
• Choose what Copy From brings overCopying settings or effects between layers now asks which parts you want: take just the Shape from one layer and leave its Tilt alone, or pull two effects out of a stack of five instead of the whole thing. Your choice is remembered while you work, and Copy Effects now says up front that it replaces the layer's current effects, which it used to do on a single click with no warning.
• Width Profile and Custom Shape start from a shapeBoth used to open as a flat line, which reads as an empty control rather than as a neutral one. Width Profile now starts wide at the root and fine at the tip, the taper most hair wants, and Custom Shape starts on a curve that shows what drawing on it does. Reset still returns either of them to flat.
• The base heads no longer come with brows and lashesThey were made of fibre hair rather than cards, which put around half a million triangles into a head whose only job is to be a surface to groom on, and made it slow to add. Growing brows and lashes is what this workflow is for, so a pair that comes already made is in the way rather than a head start. Heads already imported into a project are untouched.
• Clearer icons in the effect listEvery effect now has an icon that says what it does, instead of a generic wrench on the ones that had none.
• Bake your maps in stagesImport with just the color, go back and bake roughness, normal, alpha or the ID pass later, and Reimport Cards now picks them up. Textures you pointed at by hand are still left exactly as you set them. Note that Reimport rebuilds the card material, so it is the add-on's to own while you groom; customise it once the hair is finished.
• Convert to Mesh warns about layers it cannot includeA layer switched off with the monitor toggle has no geometry to convert, so it never made it into the finalized mesh. That happened quietly; now Convert lists those layers and asks before going ahead. Hiding a layer with the H key is unaffected: those convert normally.
• Start a bake without leaving the Groom workspaceOpening Groom on its own used to be a dead end if you had nothing baked yet: the only way to a bake scene was to leave the workspace and go through the main panel. There is now a button at the top of Groom that opens one, and from that moment the two workspaces link up in both directions, the same as if you had started from the bake. When cards are already imported the button says what it can actually do: a bake scene opened here makes a NEW atlas, since the strand settings behind an imported one live in the blend it was baked in.

• Maps baked after the first import were ignoredThe first import decided which textures the material would ever have. Bake the roughness later and nothing would bring it in, not even reimporting, and there was no way to fix it from the panel.
• Changing the work folder lost the card texturesPointing the bake Export at a different folder left the groom still looking for its maps where they used to be. It failed in two ways, both of them silent. The update could rebuild the card material with no textures at all; or it could bring the new card shapes across and leave the material wearing the previous bake's atlas, which looked like it had worked because the shape plainly changed. The groom now follows the folder, the textures follow the bake that was just written, and any map it still cannot find is named instead of being left out without a word. A map you pointed at by hand is left where you put it.
• Grooming could overwrite your textures without saying soThe textures a groom uses are written into the work folder, under the same names the bake Export uses. Point a groom at the folder an imported atlas came from and its files were replaced on disk, with nothing to undo. Choosing the folder now names in red exactly which files would go, before you accept.
• Grooming could fail with nothing you could do about itImporting cards by hand and then baking in the same file left the work folder unset, because Groom on Character only asked for one when it had cards to bring across. Update from Bake then stopped with “no work folder set” and no way to choose one from where you were standing. Press Groom on Character without one and a folder field now appears under the button instead.
• Hand-picked textures did not loadA texture chosen through the file browser was ignored when Blender's Relative Paths option was on, which is its factory setting, so the map simply never appeared in the material.
• Merging layers could report success without mergingWhen Blender refused the merge, the add-on still said it had joined them and left the layers untouched. It now says what happened. The same silent failure could leave stray meshes behind when converting to mesh.
• Confirmation warnings stayed on screen after the factAdding a card layer left “This emitter has no UV map” sitting in the Adjust Last Operation panel every time, on emitters that have one. The same thing happened to every other confirmation in the add-on, including the ones about deleting a strand or resetting the bake scene: the text that asks whether to go ahead was being repeated afterwards as though it described what had just happened.
• The layer list's hide button showed the wrong icon and the wrong switchIt drew an unrelated glyph in place of the eye, and it read that icon from one visibility switch while toggling another, so hiding a layer with H left the row describing a state the layer was not in. A hidden layer is now greyed out in the list.
• Menus could flicker into odd charactersSome dropdown entries showed random characters when the mouse passed over them. The lists affected were the effect menu, the layer and haircard pickers, and the packed-texture channels.
• Strands made after a groom layer came out wrongCreating a card layer before making any strand left the bake reading the Groom side's node groups, because four of them answered to the same names. A strand added afterwards looked nothing like the preset it was built from, and nothing said why. The names no longer overlap.
• The effect list named things differently from the menu that adds themAdding Shrinkwrap to a layer listed it as “Shrinkwrap Hair Curves”, while Frizz stayed “Frizz”. Every effect now reads in the list exactly as it reads in the menu.
• Removing the base head said less than it didRemoving it deletes the emitter, so any layer grown on that head loses the surface it was grooming against. It now warns first when there are layers to lose.

Initial release.