HairFlow: Modeling 3D Hair Strands with Multi-Modal Conditioned Diffusion

Abstract

Modeling 3D hair strands is challenging due to complex hairstyle geometry, scarce high-quality training data, and incomplete or noisy input observations. Foundation models offer broader hairstyle priors, but their outputs are not directly usable for strand-based rendering and simulation. Existing approaches require costly per-instance optimization to fit hair priors to meshes from foundation models and 2D orientations from specialized predictors trained on limited hair data, restricting efficiency and generalization. We present HairFlow, a multimodal conditioned diffusion framework for efficient and controllable hair strands modeling. HairFlow conditions strand generation on two complementary representations: a coarse mesh that constrains global shape and multi-view sketches that specify local strand flow. HairFlow combines an Orientation VAE with a conditioned diffusion transformer to generate volumetric fields that are traced into explicit strands. To overcome the lack of paired sketch-strand training data, we introduce an automatic synthesis pipeline that generates geometrically aligned multi-view sketches with diverse styles representative of inference-time inputs. Experiments show that HairFlow generates plausible 3D strands that faithfully follow the input conditions across diverse hairstyles, substantially reduces inference time, and supports flexible multimodal control.