Curve-BStrands - Hair Strand Atlas & Hair Cards Add-on for Blender 5.1+

Webpage - Curve-BStrands
Documentation - docs.mrybrik.com/curve-bstrands/

If you have some questions or suggestions you can always DM me or join my new community in Discord - Join the Discord

Curve-BStrands is a Blender add-on for making hair strand texture atlases: the sheets of baked hair that game and real-time characters wear on hair cards.

You build locks of hair from curves, shape them with a stack of procedural modifiers, colour and comb them, and bake the whole sheet into ten texture maps. Curve-BStrands then builds UV-ready cards that already wear the atlas, or hands the layout to the companion add-on Agile Hair Cards(in development).

Everything stays procedural until you decide otherwise. Change a slider and the strands rebuild; comb by hand and your edits ride on top of the modifiers instead of being wiped out by them.

How it works

1. Set up the scene with one click, so curves render with thickness and baked colours are not tone mapped.
2. Create strands from a preset or from scratch, and set how wide, long and dense each one is.
3. Shape them with the modifier stack.
4. Colour and edit: a root-to-tip gradient, painting on the strands, and hand sculpting.
5. Bake the bake zone into texture maps.
6. Use the atlas: build UV-ready cards, or export the UV layout to Agile Hair Cards.

Eight modifiers, any number, in any order

Each one has masks along the strand and across the lock, plus falloff curves you draw yourself, so an effect can start at mid-strand or touch only the left edge.

• Curve — the lock follows a guide curve you edit like any Blender curve; its per-point Radius and Tilt shape the lock too.
• Bend — sweeps the strands around an axis.
• Curl — a helix per strand, or a ringlet wound round the lock's own axis.
• Braid — a real weave: two to eight flows, fishtails, per-rope guide curves you can drag, and collision that keeps the ropes out of each other.
• Noise — a smooth, natural wobble along the strands.
• Clump — pulls strands toward shared clump centres.
• Layers — locks stacked in layers, each shorter than the one behind it: layered haircuts and fur.
• Stick Out — stray hairs that leave the lock.

Colour and hand editing

A root-to-tip gradient and per-strand variation, plus a brush for painting straight onto the strands with a colour wheel and an eyedropper. Sculpt with Blender's own curve brushes where you want to place something by hand, then capture the result as an edit layer — it sits on top of the modifiers, so you can keep changing them underneath and your combing follows.

Ten maps, baked in EEVEE or Cycles, up to 8K

• Albedo — the root-to-tip gradient multiplied by painted colour
• Alpha — strand coverage: white hair on black
• Specular and Translucency — levels masked by the strands
• Depth — position through the sheet, back to front
• Normal — OpenGL or DirectX convention
• Root-Tip — 0 at the root, 1 at the tip
• Direction — which way each strand runs
• ID — a flat colour, or grey level, per strand
• Ambient Occlusion — ray traced by the chosen engine

The output is built for cards: edge padding so filtering never samples empty space, an alpha threshold for hair thinner than a pixel, gap filling for strands that bake dashed, 16-bit data maps, and per-map alpha when you want a transparent background instead of a solid one.

The bake zone is the yellow rectangle that becomes the atlas — fit it around your strands, drag it in the viewport, or flip the layout. The texture size follows the zone: Resolution goes on the long side, and the short side follows in power-of-two or free proportions.

UV slots, cards and export

Every bstrand owns a UV slot: the rectangle of the atlas it occupies, drawn in the viewport and draggable, and bstrands that belong on one card can be grouped into a single slot. Create UV-Ready Cards builds one card per slot, already UV'd and wearing the baked maps. Export UV Layout writes the same slots for Agile Hair Cards.

What you can make

• Straight locks, tapered tips, clumped and layered haircuts
• Soft waves, tight coils, ringlets and frizz
• Braids and ropes with two to eight flows, fishtails, and braids that follow a curve
• Short and layered fur, eyebrows and eyelashes
• Flyaway and stray hairs growing out of any of the above

Seventeen presets come with the add-on, in six groups — Straight, Curl, Braid, Bend, Fur and Face — and you can save your own into your own groups.

Requirements

• Blender 5.1 or newer (tested on 5.1 and 5.2)
• EEVEE or Cycles — both bake every map
• Any system Blender 5.1 runs on; a GPU is worth having for 4K and 8K bakes

Documentation and support

A full user guide lives at docs.mrybrik.com/curve-bstrands/: installation, a quick start that builds your first atlas, and a chapter for every panel. Every control in the add-on also has a tooltip.

Beta. Curve-BStrands is in beta and in daily use on my own work. Everything described here works; the interface is still moving as people tell me what gets in their way. Updates are included with your purchase, and if something is broken or missing, write to me at mr.ybrik@gmail.com — that is how most of this got built.