Adding a hair rig deletes custom UV map

[jeroen b]

While playing with the fun new hair rig feature, I noticed that a custom UV map for the hair will be deleted when creating the hair rig, just create a new UV map and select it, after the rig is created it will be gone.

A minor issue is that viewport selection of all bones of the hair rig (except the IK target's) is disabled in the outliner. That can be confusing for a user who is unaware of it.

[Thomas Larsson]

Both the make hair and hair rig tools separate the hair mesh into loose parts, which speeds up the processing a lot. In previous versions of Blender, the built-in tool that does this had some serious performance issues, which I avoided by writing my own code. However, my version only kept the active uv map, which is necessary to figure out the location of the hair strands. Since other uv maps aren’t needed for particle hair, they were discarded.

Now it seems that the issues with the builtin tool have been fixed, and therefore the plugin can use that instead, and the extra uv maps are maintained.

If you want to manipulate the individual bones, you can set the control method to None and turn on auto ik. That gives you both ik targets and fk control of all the bones.

[jeroen b]

The custom UV map issue is fixed, thanks! An odd thing happened when I tried the automatic weighting method on a very dense hair mesh (about 270.000 vert.), the vertexgroups were created but without weights assigned. When I deleted 90% of the mesh, it worked as expected, perhaps a Blender limitation?