Wind through Fur

I’ve got a wind effect (on an Empty) parented to fur (static particles on a sphere). It does manage to displace the fur initially, but when I animate the sequence the fur remains in the same static position (displaced, but not animating), while I was hoping to get a nice effect of wind blowing the fur.

I’m still relatively new to Blender, so I may have missed the magic button.

Any help would be greatly welcomed.

Marc

Hi,

I guess you’re using softbodied curve guides to move the fur? The wind force doesn’t behave like wind. It seems to act like a constant force in a particular direction. You might want to try animating the direction and strength of the wind to get some visible effect on the fur.

I think it would be nice if the wind force behaved more like real wind and exerted a force perpendicular to each face and proportional to the angle the face makes with the wind. We could make really cool flapping flags very easily.

If you just want some gentle waving you could try what I describe in this thread:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=72921

but I’m not sure if it’ll work well for your purposes.

Nothing that sophisticated just yet… I’ve taken your suggestion and done some IPO curves for strength, fall-off and location of the windsource and just running an animation off to see how that works - but it looks like that could be what I need for the moment.

Thanks for the quick reply - I’m incredibly impressed by the Blender community as a whole - so well documented and very helpful.

No problem! Yep, the Blender community is full of genuinely helpful and friendly people, and also feckless slackers with nothing better to do with their time like me :wink:

I’m fairly new to posting on these boards too, though I’ve been playing with Blender for a while. It’s nice being able to help others after having read so many helpful things on these boards.

I need to get the hang of softbodies, I think; from what I read in the online blender manual it’s what I want to use to get slightly more realistic movement… for the moment I’ve got three gently osscilating wind effects moving the particles about and that would appear to do the job, at least to the extent that I need it.