Important

The Hair Strand Builders depends heavily on the hiearchy and naming structure of the nodes and groups. Please keep the following in mind while using them:

Strand Guard

To avoid causing errors from unrecommanded behaviours, a guarding/warning system is implemented. If you see the red warning below, please stop what you are doing immediately, and clean up/undo if possible, whatever you just did.

This warning will show up if you do any of the following:

Hiearchy

Do not change the hierarchy (moving nodes in/out of the main xgt_tube2_grp or xgt_card2_grp).

Renaming

Do not rename any nodes (including the shader nodes). Only use the renaming button on a layer to do so when needed.. This is because each tube geometry, on creation, goes through multiple node connection. At the moment, many functions uses the naming as references to run properly. Any renaming done manually can easily break the tool.

Texture file nodes are okay to rename.

Duplicating

If you need to duplicate a strand, only use the 'Duplicate' button on the main UI.

Selecting a Hair Strand's curve, or geometry, and CTRL + D will most likely to break the future editing.

If you need to re-use a curve you can either:

• Use the duplicate button on the main UI (or from the marking menu if you have it installed), or

• In curve mode, CTRL + D on the curve and then "Menu -> Clean Selected Curves"

Doing either of this will give you a cleaned up curve named as "xgtCard2_cleaned_crv#" in outliner.

If you need to duplicate a strand geometry:

• Use the Duplicate button on the Main UI only.

Modifying Geometry

It's highly discouraged to modify your strand geometries. The strand builders are procedurally generated, and if the strand geometry is manually modified, this can break the functionality of the sliders in the Strand Editor, and UV operation.

You should only change the shape of your geometry (tube or card) by using the UIs provided. Manual editing should be done at the very end of your workflow. If you need to modify the geometry, please 'Extract' the strands first, and do so on the cleaned up copy.