Is it possible for hair dynamics to a portion of a selected mesh? Say I wanted to have a tail that had hair dynamics basically applied to the tip but not the base. Is that possible?
Yes, go into particle mode, and change to ‘weight’ (in the menu with brush,cut…) change the strength to 1. Whichever hairs you want not to move paint until they are 100% red. Re-bake your dynamics and those hairs will stay straight and unmoving.
Thanks…will give this a shot. One question though. I have always heard not to bake anything f you are planning to animate. I am still fairly new to the process but learning quickly (I hope). What is the purpose of baking?
If you make changes to a simulation (in this case changing the manual stiffness weights of the hairs) you must re-bake the simulation or you won’t see any changes. The short answer is that you always need to bake (at least once), and if you have made changes to the simulation parameters you must re-bake. Baking runs the simulation and caches the results to disk. If you plan on animating the hair emitter, just add the key frames, and then re-bake the hair dynamics. The stack order should be:
Top: Armature
Middle: subsurf (1/1 or 2/2)
Bottom: Hair particle system. In the particle setting check the checkbox ‘use modifier stack’
Ah that explains it…Thanks for the info