 Blender 3.5 is out and it ships with a bunch of built-in node group assets which are aimed at a procedural hair grooming workflow. That means a lot of the tools of the old hair system and much more is now available for the new grooming system supporting the new grooming tools. And even better, it's all powered by geometry nodes. But don't worry, that doesn't mean that you need to be a pro at nodes to be able to use the new system. If you prefer, you can stick to the modifier interface and use all of the main functionality and stack operations that way. But if you want to take your workflow to the next level, you can move your system to the node editor and unlock the full potential of this node-based hair system. To give you a smooth entry into this new way of doing procedural hair grooming in Blender, let me give you an introduction of how to get started and what to watch out for. There is one small disclaimer that I want to give right away Although the idea is to replace the old hair system in Blender entirely, we are not quite there yet. The focus so far has been on static use cases, so simulation hasn't been added yet. Full support for hair dynamics is another target for another Blender release. So keep that in mind if you're already looking to replace the old hair system in your workflow. But that said, let me show you a little bit of what the new system can do already. The new node-based system is a lot more modular than the old system was. That means instead of having a lot of parameters in one big list, whether you need them or not, and with no way of extending the functionality yourself, the new system is based on individual modular building blocks. You can't combine and stack them however you need. And the fact that everything is using geometry nodes means that if you know your way around them, you can build all sorts of custom operations to what exact you need them to do. The setup for these building blocks can be found in the Asset Browser. They are node group assets in the new built-in Essentials library that Ships will Blender now. They can be added either as modifiers directly on your hair object or for full control as nodes in your geometry nodes notetree. Here you can also find them just as any regular node in the Add menu under the Hair category. You can see that they're organized in different subcategories. Defamation for general operations that deform the individual hair curves, generation for operations that create new hair curves either from an existing base or from scratch, guides for operations that enable a workflow based on guide curves that other curves are deformed around, read for nodes to retrieve data from the hair curve in the geometry nodes setup, utility for general utility operations around hair curves, and write which currently only contains one operation to set the thickness of the hair curves with a profile. Some of these help you to have an easier time when you're building your own hair operations using geometry nodes but most of them are meant to be usable directly as they are in your grooming workflow. The fact that these are individual operations now rather than one big block means that you can add multiple of them and add them in any order that makes sense for your specific use case and that allows for a whole lot of flexibility. But how do we actually now go ahead and use these new tools for a grooming workflow? If you're starting from an existing base that you manually groomed, the easiest way to add these procedural operations is by dragging them directly from the asset browser onto the curves object in the 3D viewport. They are then added as modifiers in the modifier stack where you can adjust and tweak the settings in the familiar way. Some of the modifiers require you to set the surface object and the UV map to work properly. For example, the interpolate hair curves modifier which interpolates the existing hair curves over a surface mesh with a certain density. This workflow is quite similar to the interpolated children in the old hair system. One way of giving yourself a head start when starting from scratch is to just use the quick fur operator. You can find it in the add menu under the curves category. Just make sure to have the object to receive the fur set as active and it will flood the mesh surface with new hair curves. You can tweak some basic settings in the redo panel but all of this is now using the new hair system so the building blocks of the essentials bundle are added in the modifier stack. There you can tweak all the parameters of the procedural setup like the density and the scale of the noise deformation for example. Something that's super important when you're working with hair is to have a setup where you can select specific guide curves that the others are deformed around. For example for clumping, braiding and curls. When using the interpolation workflow there's already a set of selected guides for each curve. So when you're adding another operation like clumping or curling for example this guide map can automatically be used. You can see here that when I'm in curve sculpt mode I see the overlay of the original curves which are the guides and when I move these around you can see how the clumps are exactly matching the guide curves. If instead I want to create a new guide map and not rely on the previous guides I can just disable the existing guide map toggle and create a new one on the fly. Whenever a new guide map is created it will propagate to the operations after. To get more granular control of how this guide mapping works you can either use a create guide index map modifier or get another layer of control if you're working with nodes directly. But yes so that means that finally you can do multiple layers of clumping with the different granular levels. Whenever the modifier workflow is not enough to give you the flexibility that you need you can just move your existing modifier setup to a node tree. There's a new operator that allows you to do that by just simply going to the dropdown menu here and running the move to nodes operator. This will wrap your existing modifier in a separate node tree that just contains your one node of that modifier and now you can connect anything to the inputs that you need. This is a very convenient workflow of starting with simple modifier setups and then whenever you need more flexibility move everything to nodes. And whatever kind of setup you're creating because everything is based around the new curves type you can always just apply the modifier and then it's real geometry. That means if you're happy with your procedural result but you want to make small tweaks here and there that you can't quite do in a procedural way just apply and tweak it manually. By default your hair curves do deform with the underlying surface but full hair dynamics in terms of simulation are not supported yet. And that is about as far as I want to take it in this introduction video but there's another video that you can watch where I'm walking you through the process of creating this procedural first setup of a fuzzy highland cow. Check that out and get a more slowly paced and detailed explanation of how to use the new nodes. Bye for now.