MeshMind
Keratin — Hair Card Studio · Blackframe Labs
Turn hours of manual hair-card work into minutes.
Blender emits particle hair and bakes images — but it has no dedicated pipeline for game hair cards. Keratin is that pipeline: generate a full card set, pack an atlas, bake every map, and export a game-ready pack with metadata, without leaving the sidebar.
✓ Blender 4.2+ (tested 4.2–4.5 LTS) · ✓ Legacy add-on or Extension install
2–6 hours of manual work, down to under 15 minutes
The manual route means hand-placed planes, separately styled emitters, hand-arranged UVs for an atlas, baking one object at a time, then writing metadata for the engine by hand. Keratin collapses that whole chain into a handful of clicks.
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Manual, native Blender Planes placed by hand, emitters styled one by one, UVs arranged manually, objects baked individually, engine metadata written by hand. |
With Keratin Create Full Card Set → Pack Cards to Atlas Grid → Bake Full Atlas Pack → Export Game Pack. Four steps, one sidebar tab. |
Four studio systems — all included
One sidebar tab, one pipeline from grow to game-ready.
Region-aware layout built on Blender's own hair particle system.
- Create Full Card Set across Top, Front, Sides, Back and Nape in one click
- Straight, Wavy, Curly and Coily presets, plus per-card length, clump and kink controls
- Children, clump and kink driven directly by the particle system
- Root/tip color ramp, palette, variation and gray blend
Every card, every map, one pass.
- Pack Cards to Atlas Grid before bake, so layout is settled once
- Bake Full Atlas Pack: Albedo, Alpha, RootTip, AO, Roughness, Normal, Flow, ID, Depth
- 1024 or 2048 resolution, choose only the maps you actually need
- Default output path sits next to your .blend at //keratin_bake/
Engine-aware from the first export, not an afterthought.
- Atlas PNGs plus a matching cards.json written together
- Metadata built for Unreal / Unity pipelines out of the box
- Reproducible — seeds and .ker serialization mean the same style bakes the same way twice
Styles that travel with you between projects.
- Save and load full styles as portable .ker files
- Reuse a style across characters or projects without rebuilding it
- Hair Blocks add a metadata layer for the wider Follica pipeline
Built around four design principles
- ✓ Cards are the product — this isn't for infinite scalp grooms
- ✓ Reproducible: seeds + .ker serialization, not one-off results
- ✓ Fast defaults: upward normals, sensible lengths, one-click sets
- ✓ Engine-aware export: maps and metadata, not just viewport-pretty hair
- ✓ Works as a legacy add-on zip or a Blender 4.2+ Extension
What it won't do
Keratin is a card pipeline, not a full grooming suite.
The design principle is cards as the product. If you need strand-level render hair for a cinematic close-up, that's outside what this pipeline targets.
Tested on 4.2 through 4.5 LTS. It won't install or run on older versions.
The atlas baker captures what your particle system produces — a rough or sparse groom will bake into a rough or sparse atlas.
Export hands you atlas PNGs and cards.json for your engine — weighting and attaching cards to a skeleton stays your pipeline's job.
Installation
- Legacy add-on: Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install…, select the Keratin zip, enable it
- Or install as a Blender Extension via Get Extensions / local extension install (4.2+)
- Open the 3D Viewport Sidebar (N) → Keratin tab
- Click Create Full Card Set and pick a preset to start your first pass
Support
Questions about a bake, an export, or a specific preset? Send your Blender version and what you expected to see. Contact: [email protected]
