I was thinking about making a new character in Blender and wanted to give them particle hair, but I don’t want to use hair dynamics or physics, because not only do they take a long time to load and is very heavy on my computer, but it’s really difficult to animate the hair in the way you want. I wanted to make my characters hair change shape and look, for example, if they are surprised, the hair can shoot into the air. I tried using the AnimAll addon because I thought that’d be the most obvious solution, but it did not work. Is there a way to do this in Blender? And if not, is there an addon I can download?
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I’m not sure you’ll find an addon that specific,
There are cool stuff for hair but I’m pretty sure they don’t account for animation.
But in general to solve these kind of problems, instead of having a super complex setup that account for every possible shapes, you basically have several hair system,
One is the standard shape and should cover most of your regular needs, and for the example you mention you switch to another hair model / rig which allows to do only that specific gag.
This is also a bit influenced by the animation style, say you want to go from these two shape in slow motion it won’t work , but since these cartoony gags works better with an animation very snappy that a good fit.
That’s how you deal with extreme transformation in general,
Then for the specifics of how to rig and control the hairs it’s another subject !
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Not exactly. I never said I wanted to switch hair systems, I wanted to animate hair systems, the same way as animating a lattice, just by moving strands of hair in the Particle Edit Tab and adding a keyframe, so when the animation plays, the hair would move in a specific way without the use of physics. That’s why I said that I tried using AnimAll.
Hum, ok I think you wanted to somehow rig hairs with bones (as , but you want more something that allows you to comb hairs for each frames.
I doubt an addon allow for that…
Something might be possible by using a mesh as a base instead of particles / curves and add each keyframe as a shapekey…
And use geometry nodes to convert that to the final hairs !
But it’s probably going to be heavy and clunky to use …
You can look into shapekey for hair addons for Blender:
Another addon:
I am hoping we one day get official shapekeys for hair in Blender. We had something like that in the gooseberry branch some years back which they removed for some unknown reason. Why they removed it, we will never know.
The hair pining thing with the second addon is also a nice feature we need in Blender too.
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Will drop in a link to another thread where we briefly discussed hair rigs:
I’ve used that hack in several cases, it slows things down a bit but works. As it copies bone deform from a guide mesh you can scale hair up and down too.
Apart from this, I’d look into force fields and play around with settings.
So a little update concerning the “manually animated hair particles dilemma”,
I could not try out the first addon for it has been taken off the shelves
And as for the second one, I bought and installed the addon, only to learn that it only affects curves, not hair particles, so it doesn’t work with my model that is only composed of hair particles, which also currently uses Interpolated Children.
Suffice to say, neither were the solution.
I have an idea, but probably won’t be what you want. Make several scalps, each with the different hairstyles you want, surprised etc, and just switch between them in renders. I realise this won’t have any interpolation between, but just an idea. Would work if you didn’t mind suddenly going from normal hair to surprised hair, because people aren’t usually gradually surprised 
That may actually be a good alternative. My animation was going to have a stop-motion like low frame rate anyways, so just abruptly switching the hair may not be out of the ordinary to any other viewer. I’ll try it.
Sorry to hear that.
You can look into this: Rig and simulate Hair Curves on Blender 3.3 - #2 by SSBB210
This as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W97e8xIVoqE
I think they took that one down because its an old version and they have a newer version:
You should always try and contact the dev of these addons if you have questions or doubts before buying them.
I haven’t used or tried them myself so they are just suggestions. 