Adding instanced "hair" after animation?

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Hi–I’m trying to add instanced, game-exportable hair billboards to an animated mesh after the animation is done. I can make the billboards, but when I “apply” them, they snap back to the original position of the animated mesh and aren’t animated with it.

The problem is that the animation was done by a friend using Rigify. There is no neutral pose to go back to or work in. I can go into Edit mode and the mesh reverts to its original shape, but if I merge the hair billboards to the mesh, it wipes the vertex groups and renumbers the vertexes.

I’ve tried a few solutions–making the hair billboards (made using Geonodes) into a separate mesh and trying to hand-paint the appropriate weights, using Weight Transfer to apply the weights to the hair (which didn’t work), and a couple of other even more hare-brained ideas. The geonodes hair goes along with the mesh animation wonderfully when it’s animating, but it’s impossible to export to a game engine successfully.

Would it be possible to link the hair to the original rig and run Rigify, then rename the weight maps and delete the new rig and link the hair billboards to the original rig? It’s baroque, but it’s the best I’ve got right now unless someone has some brilliant suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

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As so often happens, I figured it out about an hour after posting. After working on it fruitlessly for four days. The solution was to use the Data Transfer Modifier. For some reason, while the Weight Transfer system was useless, the Data Transfer Modifier was pretty much instant.

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Glad you worked it out.
Remember to mark your second comment as the solution.

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hi, I know it’s solved, but you can set your rig in the default pose without losing the animation. the quickest way would be to go in the armature settings and checking “rest pose” on the top. if the mesh alone is needed in it’s initial position, you can also temporarily disable the armature modifier on it. hope this might help in the future :slight_smile: