I'm trying to recreate hair similar to the hair in the Final Fantasy X-2 game cinematics.

Ok, before you laugh at me this is simply a little project I'm trying to accomplish. I've been playing with Lightwave (which I know more then Maya) and so far I haven't been able to achieve the effect I want short of hand animating it with bones etc.

If you look at the mpeg video I linked to below (24mb) I'm trying to recreate the hair similar to Rikku (the blond girl with the binoculars). When she spins around to see the guard her hair twirls and almost goes around her neck but ends up resting in front of her shoulder. I have yet to find a tutorial or anything on the Internet that helps give a clue on how to do hair like this. And after getting pretty frustrated with LW and Motion Designer I thought I'd give Maya a shot at it since I have it at work. If Maya can do this then maybe I should use it instead of LW.

https://movies.rpgamer.com/ff/ffx-2/ffx-2_intro.mpg

By looking at this I assume that the hairs are simply poly or nurb strands with soft bodies or cloth or maybe their own custom plug-in (which is most likely). I know that Maya was used in making this video but who knows how much was actually Maya and not some custom Mel-Scripts etc.

I'm pretty sure I won't get a reply to this or I'll get linked to tutorials I've already read. But any help or insight to how to do this would be greatly appreciated. I'm by no means new to 3d but my strengths are in modeling (9 years in LW) not dynamics or animation, but I'm learning.

Thanks again if you read this and thanks even more if you can reply with some help.

Take care,
-George