Is this approach to modeling hair still appropriate?

posted to: Modeling Hair

Hey there,

I was a bit surprised to see a curve + subdivided plane being used instead of a curve in combination with a bevel object / taper object. Is this just so that you can easily apply textures later or is this an older technique that's maybe less appropriate these days? The UV map that's automatically generated even when using a curve bevel object are pretty acceptable (even if they do need some tweaking), at least in 2.8. I imagine that 'distorting' the plane using the curve would also cause some texture stretching / distortion.

Oh, and isn't the plane that's being used in the tutorial a bit too high-poly? I don't know too much about the 'vertice budget' for modern low-poly games, but I  feel like it's a bit odd to spend so many vertices on something that's going to be used only as an alpha-clipped texture.