animating hair prob
 

I am animating some characters at the moment but the hair is giving me trouble as always. I have set up the animation and when I just play it back in the veiwport it looks as though it is going where It needs to be. When I render it though it is moving a lot more and is going through the characters head. I have set the head up as a colision object and parented the hair to the head control and wonder if this is causing the problem. If anyone has any sugestions as to what might be the problem it would be much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Leon

Hi Leon

Ive not actually animated hair as such but Ive had that problem when setting up hair using mayas built in tutorials.

I think its to do with how the paint FX hair is applied to the folicle curves as when its animated in the viewport the folicles do collied with the head but the actual paint hair goes through the head.

I think theres a setting that "sticks" the paint hair to the curves more that might help you out, but I found you need more folicles to get a nice covering of hair.

I generally make the hair from a nurbs cap so to speak, that I then make curves form that are then the folicles, so for an animation (ive not tried it, but it might work) I would be tempted to try to make the cap a softbody and make that collied with the head as this would then control the curves and then the folicles (as the history is on) and then see if that would work.

I have set the hairs start position from current and the rest position from start. I then deleted the curves and my nurbs surface since they were no longer seemed to have any effect on the hair. I have uploaded a vid to see if it might click as to what the problem is.
I need to wait for it to clear with you tube but once it has I will post the link.

Also thanks for the suggestion gster I am going to see if I can get this to work but if not I have the hair systems curves saved and so may revert back to them and attach them to the control object and see if I can get that to work.

cheers,

Leon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bLiaoo-0KE

Sorry for the poor quality and the very short length of the clip. As you can see though the hair is going all over the place though.

I managed to fix the hair on 1 of the characters but don't seem to be able to get it to work on the others. When I parent my hair to the head control the translate nodes all get changed around even though the head control has all its translates set to zero. If I reset the transformations on the hair after this it goes down onto the characters body. Does anyone have any idea what is causing this and if it can be fixed. I also noticed on the character which I somehow got to work when she moves forward all the translates change as you would expect but if I select the hair they are still at zero but it has moved and renders in the perfect place. Not sure if this helps anyone know what is going on and what I need to do. Any ideas much appreciated.

Cheers,

Leon

Have you tried caching the hair? every time you play the scene, it will recalculate the dynamics of the hair. When your rendering (particularly batch rendering), it uses a different quantity of memory (more or less, depending on a number of factors) then doing a playback in the veiwport, this can change how the hair moves. caching the hair should create a file of all the calculations, so that the hair moves exactly the same every time (it's not doing new calculations with varying quantities of memory each time, the calculations are done and in the file).

Give that a try. Let me know how it works out for you.

Mark

It didnt work but I looked into my hair set up a bit more and found things were a bit of a mess. The curves were grouped inside the follicles so I grouped them seperately and then parented the curves only group to the head control. They are now following my characters properly and colliding with them and there clothes.

Cheers,

Leon