Rigging Particle Hair

I wanted to share this as it took me a really long time to figure this out.
My objective was to animate a complex particle hair groom via something other than a single curve. With the current set tools, you have kind of 2 obvious routes:
Throw on lattices and get the particles to deform by deforming the lattice
Use a curve force with the limitation that you can only use 1 curve to deform and it’s destructive to a generated groom

I went down a rabbit hole of geo nodes and looking into hacking .bphys files to hijack the solver cache and just pop in my own animated curves. These were not good solutions, however I realized that Ellie in the new short had animated hair, grabbed her rig and sure enough, particle hair. The trick w/ Ellie is it’s glued together through a script that updates the key curves on frame change or dep graph update. Not terribly awesome, but it works.

You have to have a mesh bake down of the groom curves and a set hierarchy defined in the script, also for whatever reason the curves that bake down from the “convert to mesh” button are not the same vert count, so I had to rebuild them via geo nodes. But once I got them up and running I was off to the races.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12sgA-DwecuXxB2GLv8ZbBPp2iyhkmVaB/view?usp=sharing

Hope that helps future hair animators, enjoy!

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Is it possible to make step-by-step instructions on how to do this?

Would be so great :slight_smile:

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for sure I’ll put something together

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Here we go!

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Whoaa, gotta watch it immediately - I have a feeling this will be so great! :smiley: Thank you so much!

I’ve started a video rigging a more complex groom as well. Be on the lookout for that soon

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Waiting excitedly!

Here’s what I came up with. Gotta test some moooooreee!!! :slight_smile:

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Hi. Off Subject…

What screen capture software did you use to make your tutorial?

I’m trying OBS Studio. It’s… OK… so far.

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OBS studio :slight_smile:

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Excellent tutorial. Thanks a lot for sharing. Looking forward to the next one.

@maxon Looking awesome :+1:

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More hair rigging/animation tests

I’m too hesitant to make a good groom because what if it doesn’t work and I need to start all over again.

This seemed to work though:

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