Animate Hair Manually?

[Helmut_S]

Will drop in a link to another thread where we briefly discussed hair rigs:

Blender's New Hair System and Animation

What they used in “Spring” to make hair animation work is a pretty dirty hack: they used a Python handler to copy vertex coordinates from a driving mesh (which has all the animation data) to particle hair strands. A nice fellow describes the approach in a brief tutorial here: [Hair Rigging in Blender 3.0] To my understanding the same procedure should work with 3.3 hair curves as well, there’s a tutorial around for 3.3 hair curves and animation that seems to apply the same trick …

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.