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View Full Version : A question of hair ...

Aaron
08-19-2002, 04:00 AM
Hey all.

I've been working on my first ever human character model, and I had a few questions -- I've perused the forums and already found a few answers, but I've still got one question that maybe you can help with =)

I need to do hair on my girl, but I'm not sure how to go about it. She's got long hair, drawn back in a ponytail, with some decent bangs. My storyboards call for a bunch of closeup shots (no, I can't really change them now ;) ), and her hair needs to react to wind and gravity and external bodies (she needs to brush it out of her face, lay down, etc.)

This is something I'm working on using my school's computers, so I can't install any commercial software. I can, however, run free software, demos, and scripts. That's how I came upon SimCloth, which I now use occaisionally in my work. All we have otherwise on our computers for max 4.2 is reactor, and I've never gotten to use that stuff. Few people at my school do max besides me (at least few that I've found yet), so I'm just trying to

So here are my ideas. I was thinking of doing a bunch of indivitual locks of hair and applying SimCloth mods to them. The only thing is, I don't want to have it looking like cloth, and I don't think I can get the kind of sensitivity I need from SimCloth. A Flex modifier will work for my male character with short hair, I think, but I need much better performance for my girl. Worse comes to worst, I'm thinking maybe I'll just have to combine things and hand animate the bangs (individual lofted strands of hair) bulk animate the pony tail (bones) and SimCloth the rest of her hair (on the top of her head), but I'd really like to make it look good.

Anywho, can anyone toss me some suggestions on this? Eventually I'll be throwing the girl up on either the WIP board or the finished work board for some critique.

Thanks in advance, all =)

-Aaron.
mo_pic
08-19-2002, 09:34 AM
If this is going to be your first character animation ever ... well ... you could start with something easier.
Trying to simulate hair in movement is something very, very hard. Specially in close-ups. I think that people who did things like Final Fantasy developed special software for the hair movement and in close- ups they probably hand animated some parts.
I think you should move this topic to animation or character rigging.
:hmm:
Iain McFadzen
08-19-2002, 10:32 AM
I've used Simcloth on a ponytail before and it worked really well. I was using Shag for the actual hair though, so my cloth mesh was more suited to this method (individual strands rather than a single mesh). In your case I'd be tempted to pleat her ponytail instead of leaving it loose, that way you can keep all the calculations simple and it it won't matter that the hair stays tightly together.
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