Methods for animating hair?

[Iain McFadzen]

I'd use simcloth.

[megaflaizer]

ever try that? - use soft select

[Dave Black]

Gotta agree with Iain(I really need to stop doing that ;) ),

Simcloth works very, very well for animating hair...And...

BUM BUM BUM!

It's FREE!

-3DZ

:D

[tonygib]

Hi Guys,

In a way I did use simcloth, to help place all the mesh strips that make up the hair.

The problem is that the full head of hair is like a total of 100 * 6 polygon face's mesh strips. I tried applying a simcloth to it, but
1. it wasn't really working that well and
2. it was going to take like 6 hours to process 100 frames.

I thinking a little of flex, but that tends to produce such a "rubber" type feel, not really what one wants for hair.

Right now I am tring a bones/skin setup, I just wish it was possible to apply dynamic effects like Wind to bones/helpers to automate the animation. Deflectors would be nice too.

PS, maybe i'm missing something on simcloth and hair, anyone got an example video or max file?

[Dave Black]

Don't forget that you can use a hull for the collision objects...I do it all the time with great results. There are alot of ways to speed up simcloth's calcs...Maybe a screenshot would help us to show you how to better optimize it. That really sounds like too many pieces of hair. You could probably get away with far fewer...like 5 or ten...Make you should look into transparancy mapping. Boning the damn things is going to give you even more of a headache...IMHO.

Just a thought.

-3DZ

:D

[tonygib]

Hay 3DZ,

As you can see by the screen shot, there are a few polygons. And in fact even more then what appears as at least one layer is pretty well hidden under the main top layer. You can also see how it currently renders, though I may tweak it a bit more.

You also said "Don't forget that you can use a hull for the collision objects". What are hull's, i'm sorry but you have lost me on that one, care to explain in a bit more detail?

thanks

[Dave Black]

A hull is a sort of stand-in object. Like for the head, you could use a modified sphere. Low poly. Non-renderable. That way, the sim does'nt have to consider as many verts for the collision detection.
You could just link that hull to the skull bone for animation.

Or, you could copy and optimize the head geometry and use that.

It can drastically decrease your calc times. If you had an object, say a box, with 100X100 iterations, and the topology did'nt change, you could just use a 1X1 box as a "Hull".

Hope that makes sense.

Hair looks great, btw. I gotta think about this one more...

-3DZ

:D

EDIT: The above mentioned hull tecnique is also dependant on the samples, as if there are too few verts, the system will pretty much ignore the collision, because it can't see the geometry.

[tonygib]

Hi 3DZ,

Yes, now I get what you mean about using a hull, basically a lower-res stand in (proxy) for simcloth calculations. I guess the only danger is that if you make it to low end, collision's are not checked and stuff starts to "poke" through. As allways a few tests go a long way.

Thanks for the comments about the hair, its taken some time till I finnally ended up with some hair that I was happy with.

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