I have a character whose head is parented to a bone, and the head has a weight-painted vertex group with particle-hair growing out of it. So far so good, but when I attempt to apply softbody physics to the hair vertex-group the hair itself stays stuck statically in mid air when the head moves around.
Am I missing some crucial setting?
yes, you probably set the mesh as softbody.
in softbody tab, there’s a little drop down menu on top right. before enabling softbody, make sure particle system is selected there, not the object.
I picked the vertex-group from the drop-down menu but perhaps I waited until after I had activated softbody to do so. If that turns out to be important I’ll give it another go when I get home tonight. Thanks!
you should select particle system’s name from that list, so that it only applies to particles 
Nope, still not working. Here’s the .blend file - any idea why the hair is staying in mid-air? Is it something to do with my armature?
i couldn’t get the file 
try to zip it before uploading, .blend format might cause problems.
Hmm, try this instead:
http://www.martylog.com/comedycuts/shot02hair.rar
Any suggestions you have as to what I’m doing wrong would be much appreciated - I’m tearing my hair out here!
I think I fixed it…you need to bake the softbody in the frames that the animation takes place in…for example from 384-456. The bake on that particle system is currently set to 1-250, which is default. When you set the softbody, there is another tab right above called “collision.” In there you can set the frames and then click bake. It should work from there. At least it did for me.
Regards.
…great animation by the way! Keep it up.
Thanks so much mate, I feel really stupid now - problem solved… 
No, no worries man. We are all learning here. I jsut learned how to do it as well, by troubleshooting your file. Thanks!