How can Blender’s new hair curves system be animated? I rigged it but I don’t know how the hair can be simulated.
1 Like
Hello !
I’m not sure it’s possible right now :S
My best bet would be to try to run the hair curves through a soft body , or a cloth and see if that do something.
Other option that might work better , but that’s really depend on the case, I would rig the hairs. Which would probably works better for ponytails, short hairs…
It’s possible to have the hair driven by a mesh that is simulated, or hand animated. That way you
can jump between control and automation.
That’s basically what blender foundation did in their Spring Short film ( but it’s with old hair obviously), maybe look at the movie and see if that can work for you, then look for breakdown video, and ask here for guidance if needed…
I’m pretty sure this will come sooner than later to be able to replace the old system…
But in the meantime it’s very possible that it doesn’t work at all.
If simulation is very important to your project, then maybe sticking to the old system could be a painful but valid option too !
Hope that helps !
Good luck !
Are you speaking of this? https://youtu.be/pNPPVCPuWG8
Because they didn’t really talk about how they animated the hair. Maybe I am missing something…
Hum, no I’m pretty sure it was on spring open movie for the spring character,
but indeed I can’t find the video anymore, maybe it was on blender cloud that they explained their process.
The overall idea is simple, instead of applying physics to the hairs, hairs where deformed by a simpler mesh, IIRC it was possible to use bones, and / or run a simulation on top of that to get automatic secondary motion.
This won’t work for stuff like a hand passing through hairs, but if its jus to get rid of the stiffness this can be enough.
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:
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 …
1 Like
Hahahaha ! I’m pretty sure this part was omitted from the breakdown video I saw around when spring was released 
Thanks for sharing this is quite interesting !
Indeed that shows how much an update on these tools is needed…
But it’s on the right path !
Maybe something simpler is possible now, but it’s hard to give advices since we don’t know a lot about the end goal, and since this will probably end up with a bunch of hacks, knowing the specifics will help !