How to Generate Hair Cards in Ornatrix for Cinema 4D

If you work with digital hair in games, stylized characters, or real-time pipelines, hair cards are still one of the most practical solutions. In this tutorial, I show how to generate hair cards automatically in Ornatrix for Cinema 4D using the Mesh from Strands workflow.

This approach helps convert dense strand-based hair into cleaner, more optimized geometry that can be used for game-ready assets, stylized characters, and real-time character production.

Why this workflow matters

Building hair cards by hand can take a lot of time, especially when you already have a detailed groom. With Ornatrix for Cinema 4D, you can speed up the process by turning strands into mesh-based hair cards directly inside your grooming workflow.

This makes the technique especially useful for:

• game character hair
• stylized hairstyles
• real-time character production
• Unreal Engine pipelines
• optimization of complex hair grooms

What you will learn in this tutorial

• how to prepare a groom in Ornatrix for Cinema 4D
• how to organize strands into groups
• how to use Mesh from Strands
• how to generate hair card meshes automatically
• how to build a cleaner workflow for game-ready hair

Who this tutorial is for

This lesson will be useful for 3D artists, character artists, groom artists, and anyone working on hair for games or real-time rendering. If you want a faster way to move from strand-based grooming to optimized hair cards, this workflow can save a lot of production time.

Watch the tutorial

Final thoughts

Ornatrix for Cinema 4D gives you a flexible way to build hair for different production needs. Automatic hair card generation is a very useful technique when you need to balance visual quality and performance, especially in game pipelines.