If I want to animate something like an animal with fur, I need to have a static particle emitter which deforms with an armature. So far, when I do this, I get a very unnatural looking shimmer or crawl of the fur with each frame. It seems that the particles positions are being recalculated with each frame, as the mesh deforms, but the result is I think pretty noticeable, and it doesn’t look good. Is there any way to get fur to just stay where it is?
I’ve had this problem with “animate” both on and off in the particles tab.
A couple of things could cause this. If you have the “Even” button pressed, or you are using a texture to make the hair look curly, then the particles will be recalculated when the mesh is deformed.
There’s really no good solution that I know of :(.
Definitely the first thing to check - Even distributes particles according to face area, so if the mesh deforms - areas change and the fur is redistributed.
Had the same problem myself - turned of Even at it’s all better!
This kinda blows. Because without ‘even’, my chicken’s feathers look a lot worse. In fact, they look so much worse, I think I would opt to keep the even and just live with the fact that the feathers are writhing around throughout the animation. I haven’t managed any tweaks or adjustments that make them look as good as they did with ‘even’ turned on. Without even it looks like he’s got some kind of skin disease.
There should be a way to set an even distribution and then lock it, so that it doesn’t recalculate on animation. Whoever heard of an animal that regrows it’s hair everytime it moves, for pete’s sake.
I tried subdividing the mesh once, but that wasn’t sufficient, and it added a lot of vertices… I’m kind of maxing out my memory already so I don’t think this is an option.
It looks like by turning off “Rand” I get some improvement, leaving “Even” on. The particles may get recalculated, but they don’t move as much. This looks like it’s going to be my working solution.
Thanks for the tips. I guess the weight painting idea would be to go vertex by vertex eyeballing the sizes of the faces they join and give vertices on smaller faces a correspondingly smaller weight. Ouch. That would probably work, but I’m afraid not for me in this life. I hate to seem like a slacker, but there is a point of inconvenience past which I will not venture…
Sure enough though, turning off rand isn’t really good enough. It’s the even that’s the problem, as you guys pointed out. Well, I think for now, my chicken’s feathers are going to ruffle around when he moves.
Can somebody direct me to the best way to bring this to the attention of the developers? It would be great to get this fixed.