Animating anime hair type or hairl like in second life, ( mesh hair )

I was wondering while bussy on a model, and thinking about hair (not yet made).
Full hair animation is a bit slow, and its a bit to realistic for what i am aiming for.
I’m more thinking of hair like in second life or some anime characters, mesh based hair.
But i do would like it to be animated a bit, responding on movement and gravity.

So i was thinking of using a softbody animation for it, but i’m not sure.
So i did a small test with softbodies, using different weights in this jellyfish blend file : jiggle.blend (185 KB).
I’ve tried to optimize the jigle of the jellyfish, its not perfect… but its more kind of a test setup.
Somehow to me it responds a bit well to much like jelly and not as i had hoped to test.
Now this file isn’t my goal, its just a test.

So back to the hair, i was wondering if those tentacles where, hair…
The hair tips i think would need to respond more to gravity
As otherwise i get a to much jelly effect as in the attached file.
Would it be posible to have hair / tentacle -tips to respond a bit more gravity ?
I think now theytry to get back to the starting shape causing the jiggle.

If its not possible should i then somehow seam to get such an effect with bones ?, can they respond to gravity?.
I hope softbody is possible because, i wouldnt like to animate the hair manual.

Mesh hair is something i have been struggling with for a long time.

When i started, i was doing the same thing as you are mentioning here which is a cloth or rigid body simulation.
What i found after doing alot of tests with simulations is that for one, i suck at simulations, and 2, if i could get it to work; i had near to no control over it or i couldn’t get the hair to stay still if the character was indoors.

I can’t say that i’m done with my “research” if you wanna call it that, but i found something that you have control of, can sort of run itself, and actually doesn’t use simulations.

I had watched David ward’s tutorial on creating shape key drivers for facial animation. Allowing the movement of non deforming bones to activate and control the values of shape keys. I used that knowledge to create my own Blender device for hair.

I create a bone along with the character’s rig. Not parented and just free floating. I’ll put it over the head as the hair controller and anytime i move the root bone in the animation, i’ll move the hair controller too.

What this does is give it keyframes on the location of the hair controller keeping the same as the location of the character.

When i’m done with the animation, i’ll go in the dope sheet and select the keyframes for just the hair controller and offset them so that the hair bone lags behind the character slightly.

Then i have shapekeys on my hair model for Up, down, Left, Right, Forwards, and backwards and i make drivers for each on the hair bone so that when the hair bone is moved backwards from the rest of the rig, it activates the backwards shapekey.
If the character jumps to his right very quickly, the hairbone is moved offcenter to the left activating the corresponding shapekey to make the hair flow in that direction.

Anyway, i’m sorry that this is all very complicated and hard to explain. I still don’t have it down perfectly myself so i apologize for that aswell.

Good luck on your mission!
And honestly please ignore me if this is all complicated or just junk xD

I don’t wanna stress you out with my crazy contraptions xD

Well i can understand (but not rebuild it as based on your story), but in a sense yes i do get your idea behind it.
And you also pointed out simply what i found hard to express in writing, as when the face doesnt move jiggle already starts.
In fact your writing is very helpfull to me, we both are on that quest hmm.

Another tought (after reading your text), not sure if it is possible tough but not yet tried, what if a animation key was set upon the weight itself of the softbody effect… in that case one could disable the effect gradually when the model stands still.
What do you think of that ?

(perhaps even put a driver in it, to let the weight depend on delta frame position; if thats possible in the driver math).

Oh terribly sorry O-o"
I’m not use to people actually responding to what i say xD

So what you’re saying is that perhaps in the simulation functions of the cloth simulation, you could animate some of the fields that may cause it to become solid as a rock for moments when you don’t need it to move?

That is an interesting thought. I kinda like that idea actually. And i do know that alot of odd stuff in blender can be animated.

I’m not to smart on driver math functions and other tools so i only know what David Ward’s face rig tutorial taught, so i guess i wonder what else drivers can do :stuck_out_tongue:

Gonna turn into an even bigger nerd here for a moment, on an anime fan page i’m on on facebook today everyone got on the topic of MMD (Miku Miku Dance) and i’m always incredibly jealous of their incredible models on that Program, and sometimes the sucky animation that goes with it… Anyway by watching those recently i notice there is some sort of cloth simulation going on in their hair that actually looks really nice. It’s almost as if it’s extremely resilient somehow so that it would bend but snap back into place kinda quickly.

Sigh oh if only there was more documentation on this :frowning:

Have you tried Spline IK?

Thanks for that link !!! , i actually had seen it once, but lost the hyperlink to it.
Usually i copy hyperlinks of interesting youtube blender tutorials.

I think maybe this combined with an anitmated setting " i " for how much to woble. As the problem with wobling is that it often moves at moments that for example the head isnt moving, like Razc explained.

As the problem with wobling is that it often moves at moments that for example the head isnt moving,

Actually hair is quite heavy and don’t have lots of bounce. Compare this MMD animation and real dancer. The hair animation is exaggerated, lots of bounce. They did use some kind of dynamic physics effect I think:

You know, actually i managed to get a MMD character and Rig into blender just the other day…

it’s a little hard to tell what is going on in it though, the hair is made in strands, and each strand has a bone with some kind of IK on it. But when everything is named japanese characters or different varying lengths of “[]” it’s kinda hard to tell what is connected to what and how…

Oh but then again it’s a boy character, so i bet theres even another method on a character like Miku Hatsune there.

@ridix, the left is the blender version ? :slight_smile:
Weird movie haha, but it depends a bit on hair style if hair bounces; its just that it shouldnt move itself without external force aplied to it.

@Razc
Well we not even need a driver to change between woble and solid, just hit "i " and it becomes a property that can be animated (hit i on the place where you normally would set the wobbly factor).
So then with blenders animation screen raise or lower that value should work, but at moment my hair isnt in that state yet :slight_smile: