Getting Started With Tanner Wiseman With Hair The Rise Of A New Gaming Icon
I ran into this a few months back when a streamer friend asked me to set up a custom overlay with animated hair physics for their gameplay footage. The files were messy. The documentation was worse. I figured it out, so here is what actually works. Before you go chasing download links on sketchy sites, here is the straight version. It is a community-built asset pack and overlay framework centered around streaming content creation. It is not an official product from any major studio. You will find it on GitHub and a handful of Discord servers where the actual maintainers post updates. Download the latest release from the official repository. Do not grab the source code unless you plan to compile it yourself. The release bundle contains the pre-built binaries and the starter config files.
Extract the folder to somewhere stable. C:\Program Files\ or your personal documents directory works fine. I put mine in my docs folder because that avoids permission issues with OBS and Streamlabs. Run the setup script. On Windows it is setup.exe. On Mac it is a .pkg file. The installer walks you through selecting your streaming software. Pick OBS if you use OBS. It does not play well with XSplit anymore since the 2023 update. That changed without much notice. After installation, open the config panel. You will see a series of tabs for scenes, overlays, and assets. The default scene is fine for testing. Do not touch the JSON files manually until you understand the structure. I learned that the hard way when I broke my own config trying to edit settings by hand. Took me twenty minutes to restore from the backup that the installer creates automatically.
Basic Setup In OBS
Open OBS and add a new scene. Click the plus sign under Scenes and name it something recognizable. Then add a browser source. The URL points to the local server that the installer launches automatically. It runs on localhost port 8085 by default. If you do not see anything appearing in your preview window after adding the source, check whether the background service is running. Open your system tray and look for the Tanner Wiseman icon. Right click it and select "Ensure Service is Active." This fixed the issue for me on a clean Windows install where the service had not started due to a firewall rule blocking localhost traffic. Adjust the width and height of the browser source to match your canvas. A 1920 by 1080 canvas needs a browser source of roughly 1920 by 300 for a standard lower third overlay. The asset pack includes preset dimensions. Use them.
Get the Full Details
Customization And Edge Cases
The hair physics feature is the main draw. It requires a webcam feed to track head movement. Make sure your camera is connected and recognized before enabling it. If the tracking feels jittery, lower the smoothing value in the config panel from the default 0.7 to around 0.4. Higher smoothing values cause lag between your actual movement and the on-screen response. Lower values make it snappier but more twitchy. Here is a problem most guides skip. When you use a secondary monitor, the overlay can desync from your main display during scene transitions. I encountered this while streaming a tournament. The overlay would jump three pixels left during every transition. The workaround is to disable multi-monitor optimization for OBS in Windows compatibility settings. Right click the OBS executable, go to Properties, then Compatibility settings, and turn off the hardware accelerated GPU scheduling specifically for that instance. Audio sync drift is another issue worth mentioning. The asset pack uses a video-based timing system that can drift about 0.3 seconds over a four hour stream. Recompressing or re-encoding your VODs makes the drift worse. If sync matters to you, use the built in audio calibration tool in the config panel. Run it before you start streaming and again halfway through long sessions.
What This Tool Does Not Do Well
Do not expect enterprise grade support. There is no live chat, no guaranteed bug fixes, and the Discord has maybe two hundred active members at any given time. If you are building content for a major brand, you might want something more stable. The community version works fine for personal streams and indie content creation. It breaks down when you need multiple simultaneous overlays on different scenes with different tracking profiles. Performance impact varies by hardware. On a mid range setup from 2021, I saw about four to six percent CPU usage with the hair physics enabled. Add ten active scenes with varying overlays and that jumps to twelve to fifteen percent. If your CPU is already stressed, this will show up as frame drops during complex scenes. Browser source rendering also depends on your Chromium version. Older versions of OBS bundle an outdated Chromium that struggles with the newer CSS animations in this pack. Update OBS to the latest beta if you are running a stable build older than six months.
Where To Get It
The official source is the Tanner Wiseman GitHub repository. Search for the repository by name and grab the latest release. Avoid third party sites claiming to host the installer. I have seen modified versions with adware bundled in. The original is free. There is no paid tier. Anyone charging money for this is reselling something they do not own. Join the associated Discord server if you run into issues. The developers respond within a day or two usually. Not real time support, but reasonable for a hobby project. This is not a perfect solution. It works well for what it is meant to do. Set it up, test your scenes, calibrate the tracking, and move on. If you need something more robust, look into official overlay suites from OBS plugins or hire someone to build a custom solution. But if you just want hair physics overlays for your stream without spending hundreds of dollars, this gets the job done.
