Introduction

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 (curl, braid, clump, layers and more), colour and comb them, and bake the whole sheet into ten texture maps. Curve-BStrands then builds UV-ready cards that wear the atlas, or hands the layout to the companion add-on Agile Hair Cards.

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.

A finished atlas in the viewport: a row of different strands (straight, curls, braid, fur) inside the yellow bake zone, with the BStrands sidebar open.

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, including 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

Features

• Curve-based strands. Every lock is a Blender Curves object, generated from its settings on every change.
• A free modifier stack. Curve, Bend, Curl, Braid, Noise, Clump, Layers and Stick Out, as many of each as you like, in any order.
• Masks and falloff curves on every modifier, along the strand and across the lock.
• 17 built-in presets in six groups, plus your own presets in your own groups.
• Hand editing that survives. Sculpt with Blender’s own curve brushes, capture the result as an edit layer, and keep changing the modifiers underneath.
• Paint directly on strands, with a colour wheel, palette and eyedropper.
• A 10-map bake: Albedo, Alpha, Specular, Depth, Normal, Root-Tip, Direction (flow), ID, Ambient Occlusion and Translucency, in EEVEE or Cycles, up to 8K.
• Bake zone tools: fit the zone to your strands, drag it in the viewport, and bake in power-of-two or free proportions.
• UV-ready cards and a UV layout export for Agile Hair Cards.

Requirements

Blender	5.1 or newer (tested on 5.1 and 5.2)
Render engine	EEVEE or Cycles
Operating system	Any system Blender 5.1 runs on
Hardware	A GPU is recommended for 4K and 8K bakes

How it works

A typical session goes through six stages. Each has its own chapter in this guide.

1. Set up the scene with one click, so curves render with thickness and baked colours are not tone mapped.
2. Create strands (called bstrands) from a preset or from scratch, and set their size and density in Scatter.
3. Shape them with the modifier stack.
4. Colour and edit them: a root-to-tip gradient, painting, 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.

Terms used in this guide

Term	Meaning
bstrand	One lock of hair: a Curves object made by Curve-BStrands. It appears in the Curve-based Strands list.
Atlas	The texture sheet all your bstrands are baked into.
Bake zone	The rectangle, outlined in yellow, that becomes the atlas.
Map	One baked texture, such as Albedo or Normal.
UV slot	The rectangle of the atlas a bstrand occupies, outlined in violet.
Card	A mesh plane that wears one UV slot of the atlas.
Across / along	Masks and curves work across a lock (left edge to right edge) or along each strand (root to tip).

About this guide

This guide covers Curve-BStrands 0.9.162 beta.

Every control in the add-on also has a tooltip: hover over it in Blender for a short description.