Single hair growth cycle.

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello everyone!

Im currently working on hair growth cycle video and can’t figure out how to animate hair string to look realistic.

I tried to grow it with bones which looks stiff as hell.

I tried to grow it by attaching hooks to sphere loopcuts and then follow path - works fine, but when scaled it gets messy

I tried to grow it with bevel along path which was the best result, however I couldn’t use desired mesh object (hair string mesh) - only curve.

All I want to do is just make my hair string mesh to grow up like a plant timelapse.

2

Few thoughts on experimentation; Hair Length setting can be animated. So go from zero to full hair length. Hair material can be animated; the transparency of the hair-end can be animated along the hair to make it more visible as time passes.

3

Yea, I know you can grow hair particles, but I want to animate just a single hair. The anatomical view, hair particles are just curves.

Example

4

Have you tried using two separate objects? One for the base of the hair, and one for the hair itself?

Here’s a quick test:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/37711

5

That is an idea, but how to make it look more fluent and less stiffy?

I tried that (cant show you .blend file bcz its too large) it is quite good option, however I don’t have control over mesh, which looks very poor and fake. If I just could make hair mesh deform along curve.