Strand-based grooming simulates or renders thousands of individual curves. Hair cards fake that volume with textured strips. For real-time characters the question is rarely which looks better in a portfolio render — it is which survives your frame budget, your engine and your schedule.
What each approach costs
Strands cost GPU time twice: once to simulate or deform, once to shade with anisotropic response and shadows. Cards pay once at authoring time — strands are baked into thirteen PBR texture channels — and then render as cheap alpha-tested geometry with a direction-flow map faking the anisotropic highlight.
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| Cost | Hair cards | Strand hair |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime GPU | Low: tens to hundreds of alpha-tested strips, one hair shader. | High: thousands of curves, per-strand shading and shadowing. |
| Memory | One atlas (up to 4K on paid plans) plus card meshes. | Curve data plus guide caches; grows with density and length. |
| Authoring | Strands, bake, cards and groom in one project file. | Groom, simulate, cache and shade — often across packages. |
| Iteration | Non-destructive modifiers and filters; re-bake in one pass. | Re-groom or re-simulate; caches invalidate on style changes. |
| Close-up fidelity | Bounded by atlas resolution and card count. | Higher ceiling for hero close-ups and cinematics. |
When hair cards win
Cards win for shipped game characters: playable heroes, NPC crowds, creatures with dense but readable coats, and any asset that must hold 60 fps on console or mid-range PC hardware. They also win when one artist owns the whole hairstyle and cannot afford package handoffs.
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Budget the silhouette
Count the cards your silhouette needs first — dense creature grooms can run to thousands of cards — then check the atlas resolution that serves them. Up to 2K on Free, up to 4K on paid plans.
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Confirm the shader exists
Your engine needs masked alpha, two-sided lighting and a tangent input for anisotropic highlights. Unreal Engine 5 hair card setup and Blender hair card setup cover both targets.
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Plan the atlas against mipmaps
Cards that look perfect at full resolution fringe at distance without padding. Read atlas padding and mipmap bleeding before finalizing the layout.
When strands win
Strands win for offline cinematics, hero close-ups with dynamic wind and collision, and pipelines that already pay for a strand groomer and a farm. If your shot never ships on a console, the per-frame cost argument for cards weakens considerably.
Where HairStorm fits
HairStorm is the cards side of that hybrid: procedural strands on a 2D canvas, thirteen channels baked in one pass, auto UV cards with dual UV sets, optional 3D scalp grooming, and game-engine export for Unreal, Blender, Unity and Godot. Start with the hair card tool features, check plan entitlements, then download Free and run one hairstyle through the whole pipeline.