I developed Hair Tool, addon for Blender, to simplify creation process of low/medium poly hair models

This addon will help you generate hair mesh ribbons with uv’s from bezier/nurbs curves. It is how most current games are doing hairs for characters.

For blender 2.8 use Hair Tool 2.0.x series. For blender 2.79 use HT 1.9.x.

Features:

• ability interactively groom hair ribbons based on blender particle hairs
• generating hair ribbons guided by grid mesh surfaces
• ability to uv unwrap and preview textures on hair curve ribbons
• easy and convenient switching back and forth between curve ribbons and  mesh mesh, while preserving mesh uv’s
• ability to adjust ribbons radius profile over strand length to taper the ribbons shape
• ability to convert curves to blender Particle Hair system
• Generating vertex color and weights gradients for ribbons.
• and more

Part of $ I make on this addon wil go to Blender Foundation (I think around 20%).

Basic workflow is:

• create grid mesh (quad only) in basic shape of hair, that will be source of hair curves
• mark one of border edges as sharp – it will be root of generated hair
• Use button ‘Curves from surface’ – to generate curves. Play with F6 setting to vary the look, amount of splines
• Generate hair ribbons by pressing ‘Hair setup’ button.
• If you want to switch to mesh version of you curve based ribbons, press ‘Curves to Ribbons’ button.