HairExporter is a command-line program and a python script for exporting hair from Vam and importing to Blender, so you can use it in other 3D programs.
WARNING: This is a beta product. This is a minimum viable set of scripts I wrote for my own use, but I have decided to share as others might find useful. It's not beginner or user-friendly yet. I've only tested this with Blender 3.3. Best results will be for people who already have experience with Blender's hair system and some familiarity with running python scripts in Blender.
VaM’s simulated hair is not a traditional mesh or hair-card based hair. VaM uses individual strands to simulate realistic hair movements.
However, strand hair is more challenging to export to other tools than mesh-based hair. The HairExporter workflow works by exporting the individual strand vertices, and then uses this strand data to re-create the hair style in Blender.
Combined with Vam to Daz 2 you can now get a much closer approximate of your favorite VaM preset into Blender or other 3D tools. This also opens a huge potential to use VaM as digital content creation tool for hairstyles and then export them to Blender, Unreal, Unity or any other 3D Program!
The basic tl;dr of the workflow is:
1) Use HairExporter.exe to extract hair strand vertices
2) Use createCurves.py to create curves in Blender based on these vertices
3) Use HairNet to convert the curves to Blender's particle hair
4) Tweak settings and materials until it looks right.
For example, Here is Roac's "Arty Pontail Tuck" hair rendered in Vam:
And then recreated and rendered in Blender:
How to use:
Download the zip file and follow the instructions in the manual.pdf.
Q&A:
How to port the hair to other 3D programs (other than Blender)?
Both Unreal and Unity have some support for modern "strand" based hair. The best method would be to port the hair to Blender first using this workflow. Once the hair is how you like it in Blender, you can export it as an alembic file into Unity or Unreal. There are numerous tutorials on this on youtube.
Unreal support for Alembic hair
Unity support for Alembic hair
I don't trust random .exe files on the internet
That's fine, I've included the source code of HairExporter.exe so you are welcome to build it yourself if you are comfortable with C#
This is kind of tedious - why isn't this just a drag and drop solution?
I originally tossed this solution together for my personal use only. I'm sharing it for free in hopes someone else will find it useful. However I have very limited time to provide any support or improve it further, which is why I've released it 100% free with source code. If another member of the community wants to improve it into a user-friendly GUI app, a VaM plugin or even just fix bugs and refactor the code, I am 100% in support of it. Please just credit me for doing the initial footwork. Thanks.
WARNING: This is a beta product. This is a minimum viable set of scripts I wrote for my own use, but I have decided to share as others might find useful. It's not beginner or user-friendly yet. I've only tested this with Blender 3.3. Best results will be for people who already have experience with Blender's hair system and some familiarity with running python scripts in Blender.
VaM’s simulated hair is not a traditional mesh or hair-card based hair. VaM uses individual strands to simulate realistic hair movements.
However, strand hair is more challenging to export to other tools than mesh-based hair. The HairExporter workflow works by exporting the individual strand vertices, and then uses this strand data to re-create the hair style in Blender.
Combined with Vam to Daz 2 you can now get a much closer approximate of your favorite VaM preset into Blender or other 3D tools. This also opens a huge potential to use VaM as digital content creation tool for hairstyles and then export them to Blender, Unreal, Unity or any other 3D Program!
The basic tl;dr of the workflow is:
1) Use HairExporter.exe to extract hair strand vertices
2) Use createCurves.py to create curves in Blender based on these vertices
3) Use HairNet to convert the curves to Blender's particle hair
4) Tweak settings and materials until it looks right.
For example, Here is Roac's "Arty Pontail Tuck" hair rendered in Vam:
And then recreated and rendered in Blender:
How to use:
Download the zip file and follow the instructions in the manual.pdf.
Q&A:
How to port the hair to other 3D programs (other than Blender)?
Both Unreal and Unity have some support for modern "strand" based hair. The best method would be to port the hair to Blender first using this workflow. Once the hair is how you like it in Blender, you can export it as an alembic file into Unity or Unreal. There are numerous tutorials on this on youtube.
Unreal support for Alembic hair
Unity support for Alembic hair
I don't trust random .exe files on the internet
That's fine, I've included the source code of HairExporter.exe so you are welcome to build it yourself if you are comfortable with C#
This is kind of tedious - why isn't this just a drag and drop solution?
I originally tossed this solution together for my personal use only. I'm sharing it for free in hopes someone else will find it useful. However I have very limited time to provide any support or improve it further, which is why I've released it 100% free with source code. If another member of the community wants to improve it into a user-friendly GUI app, a VaM plugin or even just fix bugs and refactor the code, I am 100% in support of it. Please just credit me for doing the initial footwork. Thanks.
