Overview

Keratin — Hair Card Studio is a Blender add-on for building game-ready hair cards.

Native Blender can create particle hair and bake images, but it does not give you a full card production pipeline. Artists still spend hours placing planes, styling each emitter, laying out an atlas, baking maps one by one, and writing export data by hand.

Keratin shortens that path:

1. Create Full Card Set — region cards (Top, Front, Sides, Back, Nape) in one click
2. Style — density, length, children, clump, kink/wave, color
3. Pack Cards to Atlas Grid — automatic layout for atlas baking
4. Bake Full Atlas Pack — multiple maps in one pass
5. Export Game Pack — PNG/TGA atlases + JSON metadata for real-time engines

Built for real-time / game hair cards, not full scalp hero grooms.

Requirements

• Blender 4.2 or newer (tested on 4.2–4.5 LTS)
• Windows, macOS, or Linux

Installation

1. Download the zip from your Superhive library
2. Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install…
3. Select the zip and enable Keratin — Hair Card Studio
4. In the 3D Viewport, press N and open the Keratin tab

Remove any older Keratin versions before installing so they do not conflict.

Quick start (5–15 minutes)

1. Open the Keratin sidebar tab
2. Click Create Full Card Set and choose Straight, Wavy, Curly, or Coily
3. Confirm hair hangs down from the cards (use Flip Hair Downward if needed)
4. Optional: select a card, adjust length/clump/color, click Apply / Refresh Card
5. Click Pack Cards to Atlas Grid
6. In Atlas Bake, set resolution to 1024, quality to High, enable Albedo, Alpha, and Root-Tip
7. Click Bake Full Atlas Pack
8. Click Export Game Pack

Textures and cards.json are written to your bake output folder (default keratin_bake next to your saved .blend).

Main features

Studio

• One-click full card sets by head region
• Single-card add for custom layouts
• Style presets (Straight, Wavy, Curly, Coily)
• Flip hair downward for correct card orientation
• Clear all cards when starting over

Styling

• Hair density, length, segments, width/depth
• Children (Simple / Interpolated), clump, tip randomness
• Kink types (curl, wave, and related options)
• Root/tip color, palette, hue/sat/value variation

Atlas & export

• Pack all cards into a grid for atlas baking
• Multi-map bake: Albedo, Alpha, Root-Tip, AO, Roughness, Normal, Flow, ID, Depth
• Bake active card only, or full atlas pack
• Export game pack (maps + JSON metadata)
• Quality presets to balance speed and detail

Library

• Save and load .ker style files for reuse across projects

Output

Typical bake folder contents:

• YourName_Atlas_Albedo.png
• YourName_Atlas_Alpha.png
• YourName_Atlas_RootTip.png
• (plus any other maps you enabled)
• YourName_cards.json

Use these in Unreal, Unity, or custom card shaders. Exact material setup depends on your project.

Performance notes

• For tests, use 512 or 1024 resolution and only the maps you need
• Quality controls bake strand count and tile size (Low → Ultra)
• Viewport speed: lower Display % while editing; hide unused cards in the Outliner
• Save your .blend before baking so relative output paths resolve correctly

What this product is not

• Not automatic scalp hair on a character mesh
• Not a physics or dynamics simulator
• Not a full photoreal strand-groom replacement

Keratin focuses on fast, repeatable hair-card production for games and real-time pipelines