Need Help W/ Paint Fx Hair Animation

[spynal]

Hi, I've been working on a project for some time now. I created hair for two characters using This Tutorial that sets of paint fx hair with control curves. Now I've parented those to my characters' heads and animatedd an entire scene. I have cloth simulations for their outfits so it looks fluid enough for my tastes. But I want to animate the hair slightly when there are drastic, quick movements like opening a door and peering out really fast. The tutorial I used says at the bottom I will show you a way to animate the control curves using dynamics and cloth. But I've yet to find a tutorial that actually shows you how using this technique. I also need to have one character put his hand to his forehead and push it through his hair and off to the side and I just want the hair to move a little like a collision object piercing a piece of cloth would. If anyone has any tutorials then can link me to or a breakdown of techniques to achieve this, please help me out. Thanks a bunch.

[duncanbrinsmead]

If you have maya unlimited, then I would recommend using the hair module, which both uses paint effects for rendering and has built in dynamics. This would be much easier than using cloth for dynamics. (There is is lots of info on how to use Maya hair in the doc, along with a head with dynamic hair tutorial)

Duncan

[spynal]

K, I've tried to use the hair system with my paint fx control curves and I'm running into a lot of problems. I tried following the maya help tutorials and I'm not exactly sure how to get my system to animate with the hair system. I want to have the hair only move slightly not fly back like it does now. If you check out that tutorial I linked you'll see that I have main curves then the control curves that branch off of those and then I attached paint fx hair brushes to those, I have about five brushes, left and right main hair, left and right side burns hair, and the front hair. Now I selected all the curves, including the main ones the control curves come off of and did "assign hair system" to those. that made them into follicles and created a group of something called output curves. I attached a collision sphere constraint to the follicles to keep them from intersecting the head when they move. and I tried running the timeline simulation to see how the curves animate. The curves animate however the paint fx brush hairs stay in place. Now I've read all the hair system settings to adjust the damping and stiffness but it seems that the damping setting has no effect no matter what setting. The stiffness setting doesn't change anything unless I put it at or over 1 and then the curves go from being in the styled shape I created to straight out. I've tried changign the damping and stiffness settings per follicle but those dont' change anythign either. I've also tried to "convert selection to start curves" for the follicles that makes the curves stay in place and not move at all. If I "set start position to from current" the actual paint fx brush hairs straighten out and aim toward the ground. "set start position to from rest" And yes I've deleted the cache each time i changed a setting. At least I think I do, just click the hair system node and then delete cache, that should be it right? Am I missing a setting or a step here?

[resist]

Arbitrary Styling and Dynamic Guide Curves Using Hair :
http://www.alias.com/eng/products-services...new/demos.shtml

[duncanbrinsmead]

If you want basically stiff hair, then there are a few things to keep in mind:

• the more cvs per hair you simulate the more work required to keep it from stretching or bending. You can lower simulating cvs when you create the hair, or by resampling the start curves, or by lowering the sample density on the follicles.
• To stiffen the hair do not increase the stiffness beyond 1, but rather increase the ITERATION attribute.
• For short hair a way of making it very stiff without requiring iterations is to use the
  startCurveAttract attribute.

If you are using pfx output, then it is generally best to simply create the hair with pfx output toggled, and don't use strokes on the surface. However if you really want to using pfx strokes on the surface you can create the hair system with curve output then assign the curves as control curves on the pfx.

Duncan