FiberBake · Section 10

Groom Hair Cards

The post-bake workflow: import your baked cards, then groom them directly onto a head or emitter as sculptable layers, each with its own effect stack, and bake them into one mesh to export as FBX.

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Overview

Once your textures are baked and exported, Groom Hair Cards is where you turn them into a finished hairstyle: you paint hair cards straight onto an emitter (a head, a scalp cap, or any mesh) and shape them with Blender's Sculpt brushes.

Each card you add becomes a layer: an independent, sculptable strip of hair sitting on the emitter. Stack as many layers as you need, copy a look from one to another, and preview the whole head as you go. When you are happy, Convert to Mesh bakes every layer into one combined hair mesh and Export FBX ships it to your game engine.

Work card by card, not in bulk. Every curve you draw becomes a whole haircard, so a few well-placed cards already read as a full section of hair. Add them one at a time and use extra layers for more coverage. Spraying the add brush drops a stack of overlapping cards at once, which rarely looks good.
Letting the groom decide what to bake

You do not have to plan the atlas up front. Bake one strand, drop it into the groom, and let the result tell you what is missing: short of a piece for another area, go Back to Bake and add a strand; a card not sitting right once placed, reshape its strand and re-bake.

The Build panel flags any baked card that no layer is using, so you can prune it from the bake and keep the atlas tight.

FiberBake Groom Hair Cards: hair cards groomed on a head

The Groom workspace

From the FiberBake side panel, Open Groom Hair Cards opens a dedicated FiberBake Groom workspace. Its panel is a stack of collapsible zones, each covered in a section below: Import Cards, Emitter, Build (Layers, Layer Settings and Effects), Geometry Info and Finalize.

Exit Groom Workspace removes only the workspace. Your hair, layers and materials stay in the scene.

The bake and groom loop

Baking and grooming are two halves of one loop, and you can join it at any point: coming from a bake you just made, from textures already on disk, or from nothing at all.

  • From a bake in this filePress Groom on Character in the Bake section. The cards and their textures are staged for you and the Groom workspace opens on your scene, so there is no manual OBJ import. The panel then shows Back to Bake and Update from Bake in place of the import step.
  • From textures on diskOpen the Groom workspace on its own and bring a previously exported OBJ in through the Import Cards step below. This is the way in when the bake lives in another .blend.
  • From nothing at allOpen the Groom workspace with no cards yet and press Open Bake Hair Cards at the top of the panel. Nothing stops you building layers first and baking the atlas for them afterwards.
Closing the loop. Which button brings a new bake in depends on where that bake lives. In this file, re-bake and press Update from Bake. In another one, export there and press Reimport Cards here. Either way the cards refresh one to one with the new bake and your sculpted layers keep their grooming, as many times round as you need.
Baking a new atlas over one you imported

Importing an atlas and then baking a different one in the same file is fine. The only decision is the work folder.

Send the bake to the folder the imported atlas came from and those files are replaced on disk, after a warning naming them. Send it anywhere else and the originals stay where they are; the cards in this file still move to the new atlas when you press Update from Bake.

Hiding the imported source cards

The imported source cards land at the scene center, often over the character. Show / Hide Imported Cards gets them out of the way while you sculpt, without affecting the layers that reference them.

Importing Cards

The first zone of the Groom panel brings your baked OBJ and its PBR textures into the scene and prepares them as a hair-card material, ready for every layer to use.

  • OBJ Card FilePick the exported .OBJ. Its name drives texture auto-detection.
  • TexturesChoose the Normal format and Browse PBR Textures. Auto-detection recognizes FiberBake's export naming: _COLOR, _Alpha, _Normal_GL/_DX and _Roughness. A baked _ID map is picked up as well when it is there: it is kept aside for ID View and never wired into the material, so what you export stays a clean PBR set.
  • Import & SetupImports the OBJ, builds a flat Principled-BSDF PBR material from the detected textures, and makes the cards available to every layer's Haircard picker.
  • Reimport CardsRe-reads the OBJ and texture paths and swaps the cards in place, so a fresh bake refreshes every layer that uses them without rebuilding the groom. It also picks up maps baked after the first import. Greyed out until a first import exists.
Already imported? Cards brought in during a previous session are already listed, so skip straight to the Emitter.
Editing an atlas you imported

A texture holds the look of a strand, not the settings that made it: those live in the bake scene of the .blend the atlas was baked in. So an imported atlas is edited by opening that file, adjusting the strands, exporting again, and coming back here to Reimport Cards.

Opening a bake scene in this file instead gives you an empty one, ready to build a new atlas. That is a fine thing to do, it just will not open the one already on your cards.

Baking your maps in stages

You do not have to bake everything at once. Import with just the color to start grooming, bake roughness, normal, alpha or the ID pass later, and Reimport Cards brings them in. Only the empty slots are filled, so any texture you pointed at by hand stays exactly as you set it.

Reimport rebuilds the card material to do that, so leave it to the addon while you groom: the Groom workspace has no shader editor on purpose. Once the hair is finished, the material is yours to customize like any other.

Import Cards and Reimport Cards inside the Groom panel

Emitter

The emitter is the object your hair cards grow from. It must be a mesh with a UV map: the cards attach to its surface through that UV, so the groom follows the shape as you sculpt.

Requirement: the emitter needs a UV map. A mesh without one grooms incorrectly. The bundled base heads and scalp already have one. To groom on your own mesh, unwrap it first (Edit Mode → U, or add a UV in Object Data Properties → UV Maps). The addon warns you if the chosen emitter has no UV map.
  • Import a grooming surfaceThree real-scale surfaces are included: Female and Male full heads, plus a Scalp cap covering just the area where hair grows. The imported surface is set as the emitter automatically.
  • Emitter pickerSelects your own head or scalp mesh instead, and the layers grow from it.
  • Remove Base HeadDeletes the imported base head when you switch to your own mesh. It takes the whole imported collection with it, so any layers grown on that head are deleted too, not just left without a surface. A popup names how many before it happens.
  • Render DisplayHoldout punches the emitter out to transparent and Shadow Catcher keeps only its shadows, so the groom reads cleanly over the silhouette. Cycles only.
Why Render Display disappears outside Cycles

Both toggles appear only while the render engine is Cycles, since Shadow Catcher does not render in EEVEE. They switch off on their own when you leave Cycles, so a Holdout left on never turns the emitter into a hole in EEVEE.

Tip: The base heads and scalp are at real-world scale, so the included hair cards land at a believable size with no extra scaling.
Emitter section with Female, Male and Scalp grooming-surface import buttons

Card Layers

Each layer is a separate group of cards on the emitter that you sculpt on its own. Build the hairstyle by stacking layers, for example a base coat, then fly-aways, then a fringe.

Managing layers

  • Add / RemoveCreates a new layer on the emitter, or deletes the active one.
  • DuplicateCopies the active layer with all its settings, ready to vary.
  • JoinMerges several layers into one. Tick the layers to combine, keep the one to preserve as the active row, then press Join.
What Join keeps and what it drops

The active layer keeps its own effects and material. The merged layers' effects and card bindings are dropped, and those layers are removed. A confirmation popup spells this out before it runs.

Copying between layers

  • Copy Settings From…Replicates the shape settings of another layer onto the active one. The card, material and emitter are never copied.
  • Copy Effects From…Copies the effect stack from another layer onto the active one. Each copy is independent. See Effects.
Choosing which settings or effects to bring over

Both open a dialog that lists what is available, so you can take part of it. Settings are listed by panel (Card Width, Resolution, Shape, Random UV Mirror, Tilt, Normals), which lets you take one layer's Shape and leave its Tilt as it is. Effects are listed individually.

Sculpting and editing

  • Sculpt LayerEnters Sculpt mode on the active layer, to comb, grow and shape its cards with Blender's curve sculpt brushes. Reads Back to Object Mode while sculpting.
  • Edit LayerEnters Edit mode on the active layer, to reshape its hair curves by their points. For precise tweaks a brush cannot make as cleanly.
Tip: Picking a different layer in the list while sculpting or editing jumps you straight onto it, so you can move between layers without leaving the brush or the edit cage.
Which Blender brushes to reach for

Both buttons drop you into Blender's own hair-curve modes, so the whole native toolset is available.

In Sculpt mode the handiest brushes for cards are Add (paint new cards onto the surface), Comb, Grow / Shrink and Snake Hook (shape and lengthen) and Smooth (relax). Edit mode is for moving the curve points directly.

Full reference in the Blender manual: Curves Sculpt Mode · Hair Curves Edit Mode.

Tools inside those modes

  • Add CurveEdit mode only. Adds a straight hair curve at the length set beside the button, parked just in front of the emitter so it is never buried inside the head.
  • Mirror X / Y / ZSculpt mode only. Mirrors brush strokes across the chosen axes, so a symmetrical hairstyle grooms both sides at once.
  • CollisionSculpt mode only. Stops curves pushing through the emitter surface, with a Dist value for how far off the surface they are kept.
Card Layers list with per-layer join checkboxes and add, remove, duplicate, join, Sculpt Layer and Edit Layer controls

Grooming a Layer

Sculpt Layer: comb, grow and paint new cards with Blender's curve sculpt brushes.

Edit Mode

Edit Layer: position and reshape the hair curves directly by their points.

Layer Settings

With a layer selected, choose which card it uses and set the card's base shape. These are the essentials; everything else (length, resolution, shrinkwrap…) is added from Effects below.

Haircard

  • HaircardThe imported card this layer uses. Its material is applied automatically, so the card shows its baked textures right away.
  • Pick (eyedropper)Assigns the card by clicking it directly in the viewport, instead of choosing it from the dropdown.

Card Width

  • Card WidthThe overall width of each card across the strand. To taper the width along the strand (wider root, narrower tip), add the Width Profile effect.
  • Random WidthThins some cards more than others, so the layer stops reading as a row of identical strips. At 0 nothing changes; raising it thins more cards. Seed changes which cards are thinned, not how many.
How Random Width interacts with width settings

It only ever thins, so Card Width stays the widest a card can get, and each card keeps one thickness from root to tip.

It stacks with the Width Profile effect rather than replacing it, so a taper you drew keeps its shape while its overall thickness varies from card to card.

Resolution

  • ResolutionHorizontal and vertical loops on the final card geometry. More loops bend more smoothly along the strand and let the cross-section Shape bow cleanly, at a higher polycount.
Changing the curve's control points instead

Resolution only affects the generated card geometry. To change the number of control points on the curve itself, use the Resample effect.

Shape

The card's cross-section. Only the sliders that apply to the chosen shape are shown.

  • PlaneA single flat card. The default.
  • Cross / X / HBuild several crossed planes on the same strand, giving the hair volume from every viewing angle. Cross is two perpendicular planes, X is two planes at 25°, H is two parallel planes joined by a crossbar.
  • Arch / V / WaveBow that single plane into a rounded bundle. Each has an Amount for how strong the bow is.
  • CylinderWraps the card into a closed tube, for braids, dreadlocks and thick strands.
  • CustomDraw the cross-section yourself with a curve widget.

Shape-specific controls:

  • Roundness (Cylinder)How round the tube is: at 1 a full circle, lower down the section flattens towards the plane of the card, for a strand with volume that still lies close to the head. Thickness follows Card Width.
  • Root Flatten / Flatten LengthEases the shape out towards the root, so the card keeps a flat cross-section where it meets the head and only takes its shape further down. Flatten Length sets how far up the strand the transition reaches: 1 spreads it over the whole length, lower keeps it near the root, and above 1 the shape never quite arrives, which leaves the card subtly shaped along its whole length.
  • Open (Cylinder)Unrolls the tube towards a flat card, keeping the card's full width the whole way. It opens at its seam, which sits on the inner side.
  • Custom curvePeaks push the profile out, dips pull it in, and Amount scales the whole effect. Reset flattens the curve back to a straight card.
  • H · Size / SeparationH - Size sets the width of the two side planes. H - Separation sets how far apart they sit: low brings them together (closer to an I), high spreads them out (a wide H).
Where Root Flatten helps, and where it is not offered

It is not a squashed version of the shape: at the root you get a normal flat card at full width. Made for braids and dreads, whose roots have to sit against the scalp while the rest reads as a rope, and it works just as well for softening a Wave or an Arch near the head.

It is shown for the shapes made from a single profile (Arch, V, Wave, Custom and Cylinder). The multi-plane shapes do not offer it, as their stacked planes would collapse onto each other at the root.

Open or Roundness?

Both take the tube towards a flat card, but not the same way, and the difference matters. Lowering Roundness squashes the section, so it gets shorter and the texture is compressed with it. Open unrolls it, so the card keeps its full width and the texture stays intact.

Use Open when you want a clean flat card, and Roundness when you want a squashed tube.

Sharing the Custom curve between layers

The Custom curve is shared by every layer by default, which is what you want when the whole hairstyle uses one section.

When two or more layers are on Custom, a line under the curve says so and offers Make Unique, giving that layer a curve of its own to draw freely. A layer with its own curve shows Use Shared Curve instead, which puts it back on the common one and discards its private copy. It asks first.

Picking a Roundness that reads as hair

Real hair is rarely a perfect tube, so the sweet spot usually sits somewhere between fully round and flat. On this shape Card Width also gives a finer, more usable range than on a flat card.

Multi-plane shapes cost more geometry: Cross and X build two planes per card and H builds three, so they multiply that card's vertices and triangles (×2 for Cross / X, ×3 for H). The Geometry Info HUD already counts it, so watch the budget when you lean on them.

Random UV Mirror

  • Random UV MirrorRandomly flips each card's texture on the horizontal axis to break up visible repetition across the hair. Probability is the percentage of cards that flip (0 mirrors none, 100 mirrors all) and Seed varies which ones.

Tilt

How the cards rotate around the strand.

  • AutoFaces each card outward from the surface. The default. An Adjust slider nudges that angle by up to ±45°, still surface-aligned, which helps orient the planes of the Cross / X / H shapes.
  • ManualReveals an Angle slider that sets one fixed tilt across the whole layer.
  • Edit ModeApplies no tilt, so you set it by hand on the curve points (select points and press Ctrl+T).
  • TwistRotates each card along its own length, where the three modes above set one angle for the whole card. The root keeps its tilt, so cards stay seated on the scalp, and the rotation builds towards the tip. The value is in radians, so about 6.3 is one full turn. Works in all three modes.
Auto Tilt: excluding problem areas

On tight, curved zones like ears or nostrils, Auto Tilt can twist the cards into knots as they chase the surface normals.

To skip those spots, paint a vertex group on the emitter over the faces to ignore and type its name into Excluded Group. Cards on those zones then follow the nearest valid face instead. Leave the field empty to use the whole mesh, which is the default and changes nothing.

Normals

  • Flip NormalsFlips which way the card faces point. Use it if the cards look inside-out or shade wrong in your engine.
Layer Settings panel: Haircard picker, Card Width, and the Resolution, Shape, Random UV Mirror, Tilt and Normals panels

The Nine Cross-Sections

The nine card cross-sections drawn head on: Plane, Cross, X, H, Arch, V, Wave, Cylinder and Custom

Every shape a card can take, seen head on.

Effects

Below the layer settings, each layer carries its own stack of effects, the same idea as the bake scene's strand modifiers, but applied per layer. Add the ones you want, reorder them, and tune each in place. They reshape the layer's curves before the cards are built, so you can taper the card width along its length, multiply cards, set their resolution, trim their length, pin them to the emitter, and style them with curl, clump, roll, frizz and noise.

Managing the stack

  • Add (+)Appends an effect to the active layer. The menu is read live from the bundled library, so it always reflects what ships with the addon.
  • Remove / MoveDeletes the selected effect, or moves it up and down. Order matters: a Resample before a Trim behaves differently than the reverse.
  • Visibility (checkbox)Toggles an effect off without removing it, to compare looks.
  • Copy Effects From…Replaces the active layer's stack with an independent copy of another layer's. Editing one layer's effects never touches the other.
  • ApplyBakes the selected effect into the layer's curve control points and removes it from the stack. An 8-point curve with a Resample set to 16 becomes a real 16-point curve. Only the curve changes; the card generator is untouched.
The Copy Effects dialog

After picking the layer, a dialog lists its effects with a tick each: leave them all on for the whole stack, or untick the ones you do not want. It also warns that the active layer's current effects are replaced, so nothing happens on a single click. Untick everything and it cancels rather than leaving the layer empty.

Applying an effect that isn't first: Apply bakes the selected effect over the curve's base points, on its own. If it isn't the first effect in the list, a popup warns that the result can differ from the live preview, which evaluates the whole stack in order. Ctrl+Z undoes it.

Width and density

  • Width ProfileTapers each card's width along its length, on top of Card Width: wider at the root, narrower at the tip, or any silhouette you draw. Reset returns the curve to a uniform width.
  • Duplicate HairCardsMultiplies each card into side-by-side copies, so one curve fills a wider band. Exact and predictable, for thickening a specific clump.
  • Interpolate HairCardsGrows new cards blended between your sculpted guides, scattered by density. The organic way to fill coverage from a few guides, where Duplicate makes exact copies.
  • Reduce HairCardsCuts a layer down to fewer cards while keeping the shape of the hairstyle. Spacing sets how much: 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. Around 0.3 suits most hair.
  • Random DeleteRandomly thins the layer to break up density or lighten a region. 0 keeps every card, 100 removes them all.
Which of the two to use

Use Random Delete to break up a density that reads as too even, or to lighten one region. It removes an exact percentage, wherever those cards happen to fall.

Use Reduce HairCards when there are simply too many cards and the hairstyle has to survive the cut, typically after an Interpolate or on a dense groom.

Only one Width Profile per layer

If you stack more than one Width Profile, only the last one takes effect. Disable it, or leave it off, and every card keeps its plain Card Width.

Symmetry

  • MirrorCopies the layer's curves to the other side of the head, so you only groom one half. It stays live: keep working on your side and the other follows. Offset moves the mirror plane when the character is not centered, and Keep Original turned off moves the hair across instead of duplicating it.
Grooming the two halves apart

Real hair is rarely perfectly symmetrical, so at some point you will want the two sides to differ. Apply the Mirror and the copies become real curves you can sculpt on their own, and the new half attaches itself to the head so it still follows the character.

Cards on the mirrored side lean and twist the opposite way, as a reflection does, so a groom with Tilt or Twist stays symmetrical instead of having one side turned the wrong way.

Curve shape

  • ResampleSets the curve's control-point count, the resolution every other effect and the card geometry build from.
  • TrimShortens the strand, with randomness for varied lengths across the cards.

Sitting on the emitter

  • ShrinkwrapPulls the cards onto the emitter surface so they hug the head instead of floating.
  • Root SinkBuries the roots into the emitter so cards grow out of the scalp rather than sitting on top of it.

Styling

  • CurlCoils the cards into curls. Radius, frequency, and how strongly nearby cards group into a shared curl, from loose waves to tight ringlets.
  • ClumpGathers cards toward shared guides for a grouped, styled look rather than an even spread.
  • RollRolls the cards up from the tips for curled-under ends. Radius, length and taper.
  • FrizzAdds fine random offset along each card, to break up a too-perfect groom.
  • NoiseDisplaces the cards with a noise texture for organic waviness across the layer.
Effects are independent per layer. Adding the same effect to two layers gives each its own copy, so their values never bleed into one another.
Per-layer effect stack with the add menu, reorder controls and an effect's settings

Geometry Info

Keep an eye on the polycount while you build, so the hairstyle stays within your game-engine budget. The counts update live as you work, with no button to press.

Counts and budget

  • Cards, Verts and TrisLive totals across all the emitter's layers, drawn on one line at the bottom center of the viewport. They reflect what the card-count effects (Duplicate, Interpolate, Delete) actually generate. Show in Viewport turns the readout on or off.
  • BudgetA triangle or vertex cap for the hair. Go over it and the figure turns red in the readout, with an Over budget by N warning in the panel.

Viewport overlays

  • WireframeShows the topology of the generated cards. Applies to the hair layers only, so the emitter's mesh stays clean.
  • Face OrientationChecks for flipped (red) faces at a glance.
  • Layer ColorsGives every layer its own color, so you can tell which cards belong to which layer while grooming. Works in Solid shading, so it costs nothing in performance.
Setting and refreshing layer colors

The colors also appear beside each row in the layer list, and clicking one sets that layer's color by hand.

The refresh button next to the toggle spreads fresh colors across the layers, useful after several additions and removals have left two of them looking alike. Turning the toggle off puts the viewport back to the shading mode you were using.

Inspecting the atlas with ID View

  • ID ViewShows the cards wearing the baked ID pass, so each strand of the atlas reads as its own flat color. Useful for spotting repetition: if one strand is doing all the work, you see it immediately. Requires Material Preview shading.
  • SolidFills the whole card rectangle with its ID color instead of following the hair cutout, which shows where the cards actually sit and which ones overlap.
Why ID View behaves differently from the other overlays

Unlike Wireframe and Layer Colors, ID View is shader-side, which is why the viewport has to be in Material Preview to see it.

Convert to Mesh and Export FBX turn it off automatically, so the ID can never leave the scene as the hair color. The ID colors are also rendered flat, with no shading over them, so two similar colors stay distinguishable however the scene is lit.

No ID map yet? The ID pass is not part of the one-click PBR set, so bake and export it on purpose from the bake scene, then press Update from Bake in Groom. The toggle stays greyed out until the map is there.
Geometry Info: the live Cards, Verts and Tris HUD at the bottom of the viewport, with the budget config and overlay toggles in the panel

Layer Colors

The groom in Solid shading with every layer in its own color, and the matching swatches beside each row of the layer list

A color per layer in Solid, with the swatches in the list to match.

ID View

The groom in Material Preview with ID View on next to the baked ID texture, each atlas strand reading as its own flat color in both

Each color on the cards is one strand of the ID texture, so repetition stands out at a glance.

Studio HDRI

One-click presentation lighting, so you can show the groom without setting up lights, the way hairstyles are usually presented in portfolios. It is non-destructive: turning it on stashes your scene's current world and restores it when you turn it off. Designed for Cycles, the engine the final result is judged on.

  • ActivateDrops the bundled AXIS studio HDRI into the world. Press again to deactivate and get your own world back.
  • RotationSpins the HDRI around the vertical axis to place highlights and reflections. Shift+Alt + drag the right mouse button in the viewport rotates it interactively.
  • Intensity / SaturationBrightness and color saturation of the HDRI, handy to tame a map that ships over-bright or over-saturated.
  • BackgroundHow the HDRI appears in the render: Visible as the backdrop, Lit Only hidden from the camera (black background) but still lighting the scene (Cycles), or Transparent for an alpha background to composite over, with the HDRI still lighting.
  • Load HDRI / ResetPicks your own HDRI image from disk, or resets back to the bundled AXIS one.
If the rotation shortcut does not work

Shift+Alt + right drag is the common combination for environment rotation, so another addon may already claim it. FiberBake detects this and names the addon in the panel instead of showing the shortcut.

Use the Rotation slider instead, or rebind it in Preferences → Keymap → 3D View (search for fiberbake.hdri_rotate_modal).

Studio HDRI section: Activate, Rotation, Intensity and Saturation, the Background mode buttons and Load HDRI / Reset

Finalize: Convert to Mesh & Export

When the groom is ready, turn the layers into a single, game-ready mesh and export it.

  • Convert to MeshBakes every layer of the emitter into one combined hair mesh, with the card materials and UVs applied. It lands in its own FiberBake Hair (Mesh) collection. This is non-destructive: your sculptable layers stay intact, so you can keep editing and convert again whenever you like.
  • Export FBXWrites the finalized hair mesh to an .FBX file, ready for your engine. Enabled once you have converted to mesh. An optional Copy Textures setting drops the material's images next to the FBX so the import finds them.
Tip: Always run Convert to Mesh before Export FBX. Re-running Convert replaces the previous finalized mesh, so your export always reflects the latest groom.
Layers switched off in the viewport are left out. A layer disabled with the monitor toggle in the layer list has no geometry to convert, so it cannot go into the finalized mesh. Convert lists any it finds and asks before continuing, so nothing goes missing from your export without you knowing. Hiding a layer with H is different and perfectly safe: those convert normally.
Finalize section with Convert to Mesh and Export FBX
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Bake Hair Cards

The full bake workspace: strands, material, passes, baking, export and scene management.

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