For those who don’t know the tool: Sisir sits between character modelling and final rendering. Artists import a head mesh, create guide curves, generate strand hair, preview the groom, then export curves or hair to DCCs, renderers or engines.
Standalone grooming, no host DCC
Sisir is a standalone guide-based hair-grooming application for character artists. Artists import a character mesh, draw guide curves directly on it, generate full hair through a non-destructive procedural stack and preview the result in a real-time physically based renderer. It is deliberately narrower than a full DCC. Shocking idea, but sometimes a tool can just do one job. Even without AI helpers.
Guides, hair and render
The workflow is split into Guides, Hair and Render modules. The Guides module handles interactive guide creation on imported geometry. Guides can be drawn, extended and trimmed on the mesh, then shaped with grab and brush-style interaction. The guide styling uses physics so curves fall, drape and settle while the artist works.
The Hair module generates dense strand hair from those guides through an interactive procedural stack. Controls include clumping, sub-clumps, flyaways, frizz, length, thickness profiles, parting, push-out and distance-based strand resolution. The tool also supports hand-placed custom clumps, which gives artists a more direct way to control local shape instead of relying only on global sliders.
Masks control where hair grows and how long it is. Artists can paint distribution and length masks directly on the mesh, erase individual strands with a precision eraser and organise work into layers and hair sets. Hair sets can carry their own materials, which makes separate regions easier to manage than one huge hair blob from hell.
Transplant workflow
A hair transplant workflow lets artists move a groom from one character scene to another by placing markers for the transfer. The process is designed to preserve the procedural stack after transfer, so the reused groom remains editable. That makes it useful for character variants, lookdev reuse and early grooming passes where the face, topology or UVs may still be moving targets.
Preview shading
The Render module provides a GPU real-time preview with physically based hair shading. The feature set includes melanin-based hair colour, dual scattering, skin subsurface scattering, HDR image-based lighting, soft shadows, temporal anti-aliasing, bloom, lens flare and ACES or AgX tone mapping. The renderer is for previewing the groom while working, not a replacement for a final-frame offline render pipeline.
Formats and handoff
For pipeline handoff, the tool imports OBJ meshes, PLY curves and HDR or EXR environments. It exports Alembic .abc and PLY grooms, and saves working files in its .sir scene format. USD and FBX export are not currently supported.
Sisir includes bridge scripts for Maya, Blender and 3ds Max. The Blender bridge is an installable add-on. The 3ds Max bridge imports guides as editable splines. The Maya bridge imports the PLY guide structure. Unit selection is available when loading meshes or exporting curves, including meter and centimeter workflows, because scale mismatch remains the little production goblin that eats afternoons.
Alembic output gives the tool a practical route into other applications that can read curve data. The product page names Unreal Engine and Unity as engines that support Alembic hair or fur curves. Actual downstream behaviour still depends on each project’s importer, renderer, strand settings and scale conventions, so do not trust a demo until it survives your own asset.
Platform and licence
Sisir runs on Windows 64-bit. The Render module requires a GPU with DirectX 12 support. The personal licence is free for non-commercial work. Commercial or studio use requires separate licence terms. Download distribution happens through Discord, because apparently even grooming tools now need a server invite.
https://sisir-hair-tool.netlify.app/
https://discord.com/channels/1477236476709306462
https://ko-fi.com/sisir
