Sisir is a promising new free standalone hair grooming tool
Solo tool developer Sisir has released Sisir, a standalone guide-based hair grooming tool.
The software makes it possible to draw hair guides interactively onto a 3D character, adjust the groom procedurally, and preview it in a built-in physically based GPU renderer.
Hair guides and grooms can be exported in PLY and Alembic format, making it possible to use them in DCC tools like 3ds Max, Blender and Maya, and game engines like Unreal Engine.
The software is free for personal use, and the developer says that they are currently updating the license to make it possible to use Sisir on commercial projects.
A lightweight standalone hair grooming tool that plays nicely with production pipelines
Sisir – as well as sounding like ‘scissor’, the name means ‘comb’ in Indonesian, so it’s a double pun – is a standalone guide-based hair grooming tool.
It provides a lightweight free alternative to commercial tools like Ornatrix, or the native grooming tools in CG applications, making it possible to create hair and fur grooms for 3D characters.
It should fit into standard pipelines for animation, VFX and motion graphics, and support for card-based hair is planned – although not currently present – for games and real-time work.
Provides an interactive guide-based workflow for styling hair and fur
Sisir consists of three modules: Guides, Hair and Render.
The Guides module makes it possible to import a character mesh in OBJ format, and draw hair onto it interactively in the viewport, with the hair guides settling naturally under gravity.
The Hair module is for styling the hair that Sisir generates from those guides, with simple slider controls to control strand length, thickness, clumping, frizz and separation.
It’s also possible to paint masks to control the distribution of the hair, and to organize it into layers and hair sets, which can have their own individual hair materials.
Grooms can be transferred between characters, even if they have different topology and UV layouts, making it straightforward to reuse existing grooms.
For previewing grooms, Sisir includes a capable-looking physically based GPU renderer, with hair melanin controls, dual scattering, support for skin subsurface scattering, and post effects.
Exports to DCC applications and game engines that support PLY and Alembic files
Once created, grooms can be exported to other DCC applications and game engines: guides can be imported and exported in PLY format, and the hair itself in Alembic (ABC) format.
The software comes with dedicated import or export scripts for 3ds Max, Blender and Maya, but it should also work with other tools that can import Alembic files, like Unreal Engine.
Free for personal use, with commercial licensing coming soon
Sisir is currently officially still in beta, and is free to download and use.
The license only permits use on personal projects, although that seems to be mainly because the developer isn’t focusing on monetizing the software.
On the Sisir Discord server, they comment that Sisir “will soon be available for commercial use”, but that they “have no plans to turn it into paid software any time soon”.
Price and system requirements
Sisir is available for Windows only. It’s a free download, although you can donate to support development.
Read more about Sisir on the product website
Get the download link for Sisir on the Sisir Discord server
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