Akuba's Salon - Black Hair for Conan Exiles Part 2

This is the second hair of 10 for this Conan Exiles Black Hair series commissioned for by Terrornaut of the Deadlands server community. I created each hair in zbrush and authored APEX physics for each of the hairs. This hair mod is available on the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1938818750 .
This is the tied back dreadlock style. I grew thick type C-D hairs around cylinders using fibermesh and used xNormal to bake them down to unwrapped low poly tubes. This hair took a few attempts to make tubes without visible seams. I then Had the idea to line each tube with a few cards featuring intensely curled strays to try and sell a more natural look. Invisible low-poly guide planes help each individual tube come to life with physics. Maya's APEX plugin has some critical bug which prevents the plugin from baking out physics layers. To combat this, I used a workaround involving splitting the tubes into separate groups while making sure the tubes selected for each group were far enough apart to prevent latching errors. While this results in a few more APEX files than desired, it has the unexpected benefit of more quickly isolating and correcting physics errors without tearing down the entire physics setup.