How to simulate geometry nodes hair systems?

[Helmut_S]

Linked to it in a number of threads already, herer it is again:

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 …

There’s also Ellie from Sprite Fright, Blender Studio released the character asset for everyone: https://studio.blender.org/characters/ellie/v1/

As said, the workflow is weird, relying on a Python script that installs a frame change handler which does all the copying from proxy geo(s) to hair strands. Of course that slows things down a bit, but on the other hand it’s a good example of a strategy to bypass one of Blender’s notorious limitations.

Manual animation via rig should work for the Curves proxy trick too btw, and I reckon even more straight forward than the strands hair hack because it doesn’t need to utilize Python. I didn’t try because at the time curve hair didn’t have any reasonable procedural child hair.
I’m struggling with that regarding strands too however, I’d prefer “interpolated” children because they offer much more control and stick to the skin properly, only they don’t work in every other setup, and till now I have not found out why.