Material, Edit and Paint

Material

All bstrands share one material, BS_BStrands, so changing its colours restyles every lock at once. Its colour is a root-to-tip gradient multiplied by a paintable Color attribute, so a gradient and hand-painted colour work together.

Image coming soon

The Material section with the Root to Tip Gradient ramp and the shader settings.

Which material

Control	What it does
Material field	Assign any material to the active bstrand.
Make Unique	Gives this bstrand its own copy of the material, so you can style it separately.
Assign Default / To All	Puts the shared default material back on this bstrand, or on every bstrand.
Consolidate Materials	Puts every bstrand back on the shared material and deletes the leftover copies.

The section shows how many bstrands share the material.

Colour

Control	What it does
Root to Tip Gradient	The colour ramp. Its left end colours the roots and its right end the tips.
Eye beside the gradient	Bypasses the gradient, leaving only the painted Color.
Hue Variation / Value Variation	Gives each strand a slightly different hue or brightness, so the lock doesn’t look flat.
Bake Gradient to Color	Writes the gradient into the paintable Color attribute and bypasses the ramp. Use it as the starting point for painting.
Reset Painted Color	Floods the Color attribute back to white, removing baked or painted colour.

Shading

Control	What it does
Roughness, Specular IOR Level, IOR	The main surface settings of the shader.
Hair BSDF	Switches to Blender’s Principled Hair BSDF. Cycles only: EEVEE ignores its settings, so under EEVEE the strands stay on the Principled BSDF.
Rebuild Material	Recreates the material’s node tree and resets the painted Color, so a baked gradient is never applied twice.

Tip

The Specular and Translucency settings in Texture Bake also shade the strands in the viewport, so what you see matches what you bake.

Edit

Edit lets you comb and sculpt strands by hand, and keep those edits while you continue changing the modifiers.

Image coming soon

The Edit section with two edit layers, and a lock being combed in Sculpt Curves mode.

Sculpt the strands

Click Edit Strands. The bstrand enters Blender’s Sculpt Curves mode, where the Comb, Grow/Shrink, Snake Hook, Add, Delete and other curve brushes work as usual. Entering it locks the bstrand, so a stray slider change cannot rebuild over your work.

Edit layers

Edit layers keep hand edits and procedural changes working together.

1. Sculpt the strands.
2. Click + (Capture Edits) in the Edit Layers list.

Your sculpting is stored as an offset layer and the bstrand is unlocked again. From now on the modifiers keep working, and your edits ride on top of them.

Control	What it does
+ (Capture Edits)	Stores the current hand edits as a new layer. Capture again after more sculpting; layers stack.
Strength slider (on each layer)	How much of that layer is applied.
Checkbox (on each layer)	Turns a layer off without deleting it.
− (Remove Edit Layer)	Deletes the selected layer.
Apply Edit Layer	Merges this layer and every layer below it into one, permanently. The shape does not change.
Clear All Edit Layers	Deletes every layer and returns to the purely procedural shape.

Note

Edit layers are matched to strands by count. If a change adds or removes strands (Density, Max Strands, Reduction), the stored edits can no longer be applied.

Surface

Control	What it does
Surface	A scalp mesh for the Add and Density sculpt brushes.
Snap Roots to Surface	Drops every root onto the surface mesh and stores the result as an edit layer.

Paint

Paint colour straight onto the strands, with no mesh conversion. Painted colour survives rebuilds.

Image coming soon

Painting strands with the colour wheel and hotkey hints showing in the viewport.

Start painting

1. Pick a Color, or use the eyedropper beside it to sample one.
2. Click Paint Strands.
3. Paint with the left mouse button. Press Esc or right-click when you’re done.

While you paint, viewport overlays switch off so they don’t hide the brush; they come back as they were when you finish.

Paint settings

Control	What it does
Color	The brush colour.
Pick Colour (eyedropper)	Samples a colour from anywhere in the Blender window. Over a bstrand it reads the strand’s own colour.
Erase Color	The colour Shift paints with (white by default).
Palette	Click + to save the brush colour as a swatch. Click a swatch to use it, or its X to delete it.
Radius / Strength	Brush size in pixels, and how strongly it paints.
Falloff	Higher values keep more of the brush at full strength; lower values concentrate it at the centre.
Wheel Size	Size of the on-screen colour wheel.
Colour Wheel / Hotkey Hints	Shows or hides the wheel and the hotkey list while painting.
Clear Paint	Floods the painted colour back to white.

Paint hotkeys

Key	Action
LMB	Paint
Shift + LMB	Erase (paint with Erase Color)
S	Pick the colour under the cursor
[ and ]	Smaller / larger brush
Ctrl + LMB drag	Left/right changes radius, up/down changes strength
Ctrl + Shift + LMB drag	Change falloff
Space	Viewport overlays on or off
W	Colour wheel on or off
Alt + LMB drag	Move the colour wheel
Alt + RMB drag	Resize the colour wheel
Esc or RMB	Finish

A colour wheel sits in the top-left of the viewport while you paint. Click in its ring for hue and in its square for saturation and brightness; clicking anywhere else paints.

Tip

Blender’s own Vertex Paint mode does not work on Curves objects. If you need it, use Convert to Mesh in Export & Save; painted colour comes along.