Someone posted a video and paper about creating hair using a basic mesh on /v/. I saw it and decided to try and recreate it. I'm not clever enough to code. But I'm moderately competent at geometry nodes. So I tried my hand at it. Here's a little video.

I managed to get it to function just barely. But I'm excited to get it this far. Because it looks to be possible. I just need to find solutions to a few quirks that are causing gaps to appear. For now, the mesh requires that I mark the bottom and the tops in vector groups. And I have to manually fill in the in between layers with big Ngons. So editing the mesh is a little less than seamless. Still, it's worth those few extra steps in order to get these results. Each strand interpolates inside of the volume of the mesh nearly perfectly.(the Ngons create a slight inaccuracy in position)

And so far, it's very light weight. Creating the volumetric UV only takes a few milliseconds. It takes about 3ms to create 1,000 hair curves. The most expensive part, is calculation to make the points stick to the mesh. That doubles the time. Totaling about 12ms per 1,000 curves. Then, giving the points geometry costs more. About 20ms per 1,000 for the node group I've created. Which captures a bunch of info about the curve. I'm on a shitty PC right now. So it's probably a lot faster for those using a decent graphics card and a newer version of Blender.(I'm using 4.1)

Anyway, I hope I can iron out the remaining problems, because this will make crafting hair a lot easier and faster than even Blender's system of hair nodes. It's so much more intuitive to just move some boxes around, and it automatically interpolates exactly how it should.