Hair & Fur dynamics?? driving me crazy...

#1

Hi there,

can’t find any tutorial, documentation is not helpful as besides describing what parameters do, leaves me stuck.

I’m trying a very basic simulation. A sphere with Hair & Fur, in the Collisions I’ve added a cube (dense mesh).
I’ve tried first Live, moving the sphere close to the cube, just few hairs seem to collide, but only for a very short moment, then they simply go through the cube.
No luck running the simulation either… what am I missing?

edit: it seems there have been several posts about this matter already, is it possible hair collision doesn’t work?

#2

I´ve struggled a lot with hair&fur in the past, Max´s native system is just pretty crappy, dynamics beeing the most crappy part of it…
But since you probably can´t or don´t want to buy some other tools like hairfarm or ornatrix, here is some general advice on dynamics:

  1. hair&fur uses the guidlines for collision testing. So if your guidelines are shorter then your styled hair, or very different,you´ll run into problems.
  2. The collision meshes should be dense enough but not too dense for calculation…If you only use a box with 6 Polys, collisions won´t be very accurate…

Also have a look at these tutorials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJGAIcD0ryI

#3

Thank you so much insertmesh,

I thought it was me and I was missing important steps. I’ll look at the tutorials for sure, even though I believe I did all the necessary steps in order to get the collision working.

It’s just incredible how AD don’t care about the Hair & Fur system in 3ds Max, I mean doesn’t make any sense to have something that causes so much struggle to the users. I did a quick test in C4D, it took me 2 mins. to have the setup I was looking for and even though I’m not ad advanced C4D user, finding the proper tags and make it work it’s been very intuitive and easy. I don’t mean any flames, this is better than that, I like 3ds but come on, Hair it has to work. Unless so few users showed interested in it that AD thinks is not worth the time to improve it…

#4

Well, most of the times I thought it was just me being stupid, it turned out to be a flaw in the software itself…:wink:

3DS max biggest strength and biggest weakness at the same time is the incredible plugins available for it…

Why bother with updating the hair system, when there are great plugins out there which people can just buy if they need it?

All in all I believe most character animation is done with Maya and not in Max and I myself haven´t had a single project in the year I´m in the business now, that actually required me to use hair&fur…

But i don´t like it either…:wink:

#5

All of the hair system i used so far had their pros and cons.
Trust me, they all have their problems.

As for hair&fur i am not even sure Autodesk has full control over it`s development.
Joe Alter is very picky about his patents…

#6

I was having exactly the same problem until about an hour ago and figured out that, as somebody already mentioned, collisions wouldn’t work properly on a low poly mesh. I had grass growing on a plane consisting of only one poly. I upped the geometry to 50x50 and now using a sphere geometry as the collision object, the hair/grass deforms and moves nicely as the sphere collides.

#7

I´m sure the other hair systems have it´s weaknesses too, but I guess no one would have even bothered developing them, if hair&fur was “good enough”.

Hair&Fur still is kind of a kings discipline in 3D and most professionell studios have their own proprietary systems afaik, still, it´s there and can be very frustrating if you can´t even get seemingly basic functionality to work.

For me the single most frustrating experience with hair&fur was some nasty behaviour, which led to at least 10 Minutes of translating time, whenever I used maps to control properties like density and scale, which made it a real pain in th a** getting to the look I was after…

#8

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