Getting Waivy Hair Results Like This Example

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Andy posted this over on this section of the orange blog a while back

Now I have been messing with particles a great deal the last few days, but for the life of me, I cannot get each strand of hair to have that random waviness llike this example. He even provides the Blend file on that page and I have downloaded and studied it, but I cannot figure out exactly how the random curliness works. I believe it has something to do with the cloud texture in the 8th texture channel, as there is a reference in the particle settings to the 8th texture channel, but I haven’t been able to replicate these results (or get that texture channel to do anything for that matter) in any of my own tests. Is there someone out there who can help me, besides perhaps, Andy himself (I’m guessing he’s rather busy finishing coding Blender 2.4, and more power to him.)?

#2

yeah it’s definately the texture that produces the curly effect. the 8th tex channnel used to be used for that, but now with the particle improvements you can use any tex channel to influnce the particle speed/direction.

there’re a couple of buttons in the Particle Motion tab to control this behavior:

  • the Texture slider defines the strength of the effect
  • next to it, there’s a button for the tex channnel that is to be used
  • in the same button group you can find the xyz settings for the force vector, to be used together with the ‘Int’ setting.
  • the Int button sets the texture to influence the force [general direction] based on the textures intensity.
  • RGB… uhm… never used that one… anyone care to help?
  • Grad is what i’m using in that hair example if i’m not mistaken. good thins about this one is that itdefines the particle’s speed and not the direction.
  • Nabla defines the dimension [hey… that’s what it says in the tooltips ;)]

this works of course for static as well as for moving particles.
so to get the curly effect you have to apply a texture [e.g. clouds], define the channel in the particle settings, increase texture slider value. switch on Grad and adjust Nabla.

hope that helps!

.ndy

ps: btw i’m in no way coding blender… i’m just there to give clues about the user’s needs in blender dev… uhm… you could call it like that, yeah. :wink: