Hair: Blender to CC - 4 and 5 - Major Problems

[3DChick]

You’re all probably getting sick of these, but I’m just so discouraged.

I made a hair in Blender (4.5) with Shapekeys for morphs. Trying to bring it into CC5 AND CC4 - failed at both.

What I actually tried:

Export from Blender using add-on, “Export as Accessory,” bring into CC5 as Accessory, convert to Hair. I get a hair with morphs, but the color is somehow baked; no matter what maps or shaders I input in C55 or how I do it, it’s just dark brownish black. Note: I did NOT vertex paint in Blender!

Export from Blender as OBJ, bring into CC5 as Accessory, get a hair I can change the colors, but can’t have the morphs.

I tried using Blender’s regular FBX exporter, and get literally nothing in either version of CC, like the mesh evaporates.

Tried both in CC4, which worked a few months ago, and now have the exact same problem in CC4!

I’ve been doing this for over a year, and had a few problems now and then, but this is so frustrating - I am now spending actual days in tears.

I don’t care how I need to do it, but I need it to be possible and it sure feels like it’s not. Will try any advice.

Edit for clarification: by “don’t care how I need to do it,” I mean that the ONLY thing I’m trying to do in Blender is make hair. I don’t animate or render in Blender. I don’t care about displacement or any of the newer features. So if rolling back CC5/4 to an older version and using an older version of Blender is what I need to do, I’ll do that.

[Victor.Soupday]

@3DChick

Export from Blender using add-on, “Export as Accessory,” bring into CC5 as Accessory, convert to Hair. I get a hair with morphs, but the color is somehow baked; no matter what maps or shaders I input in C55 or how I do it, it’s just dark brownish black. Note: I did NOT vertex paint in Blender!

The vertex colours are a mask, Black → White = Vertex Colour → Texture Colour, which allow you to individualize each hair card’s shading even they share the same UV’s.

i.e. This shader setting in the Hair shader:

Which defaults to a dark brownish black.

So if your vertex colours on the mesh are all black, this settings overrides the texture colours.
e.g. if we set all of Camila’s hair vertex colours to black, it looks like this no matter what diffuse textures are used:

So either, set all your vertex colours to white in Blender, or set the base colour strength to zero in the hair shader in CC5:

[3DChick]

Victor, So sorry for delay on response. This was very helpful!!

Thank you!