Check out real-time hair creator HairStrips for Maya

AKA Tools – aka developer Abhishek Karmakar – has released HairStrips Creator for Maya, a new Maya add-on designed to create geometry-strip-based hair for use in real-time characters.

Create polystrip-based hair for games and real-time apps via simple slider controls
HairStrips Creator enables users to create hairstyles in which the hair is composed of sets of overlapping Maya polystrips in order to reduce processing time in real-time contexts like games and AR apps.

It’s intended as an intuitive solution for less technically minded artists, in which hair is edited by adjusting parameter sliders rather than painting weight maps.

When generating hair, the polystrips are automatically aligned to the character’s head based on the normals of the scalp surface. Alternatively, any set of Maya curves can be converted to strips.

There are parameters to adjust the base width, tip width and length of each strip, and its bend, twist and orientation. Width can also be determined procedurally based on the relative length of a strip.

Two further slider controls procedurally reduce the poly count of a strip.

Pricing and system requirements
HairStrips Creator 1.0 is available for Maya 2015+ on Windows, Linux and macOS. It costs $20. AKA Tools has a separate tool, Braid Maker, for generating braided hairstyles procedurally.

Read more about HairStrips Creator 1.0 in AKA Tools’ Gumroad store