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Animating Hair with Material Displacement Channel’s Noise Texture – problem with hair styles based on Splines
Hello,
I am working on character hair and fur animation.
I drive the outfit’s fur animation only by using the Hair Material Displacement Channel, specifically in the Advanced part, I use the Texture field – an animated Turbulence Displacement Noise. The Hair object Dynamics are turned off. The outfit’s fur is created with Hair Objects linked to the outfit mesh. So far so good.
My problem: the hair style of the character is based on Splines. The same technique, using the Hair Material’s Displacement Channel + an animated noise in the Texture field, doesn’t work at all, the hairs do not move. My understanding is, the linked Splines have no UV information and thus the Texture field is ignored.
Basically the Displacement Channel animation seems to work only on Hair Objects that have Guides with Roots set to Polygon.
How can I fix this?
1) Can I add UV information to Splines / the hair (Hair Object > Advanced Tab has a UV Tag field, but just dragging some UV Tag from another object there doesn’t work)?
2) Can I re-root the Spline based Hair guides, to a mesh with UV information? I need to make this process quick and easy as I will use it a lot in my project. But how to keep the exact look of the hair = have the guides roots stay in place and keep their shape and the Hair grow at the same place?
I have tried:
– Guides Tab, Editing > Store
– Clear the link object (the Hair Guides become Un-rooted)
– re-linking the Hair to a helper sphere polygon object
– select Guides Roots to Polygon, Hair Roots to Auto
– Guides Tab, Editing > restore
= the hair animation works, the guides look as the original Splines, BUT the hair actually grows on the sphere.Now I need the last step – make the hair actually grow along the guides, or the original splines.
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10 Replies
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is this displacement of spline hairs or is your project not close enough to this trial?
10418_splinehairdisplacementtrial.c4d.zip
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Sorry for the delay in communication, things are crazy over here, I am under a tight deadline.
I checked out your sample scene – thank you, it’s helps rule out a few causes of the problem.
The big difference is in the Spline I have: it’s created from a mesh, by selecting a lot of edges and than using Edge to Spline = it’s one spline objects with hundreds of fractured lines, see screenshot. So the only way to even have a nice hair distribution is to use Hair Tab > Roots set to Spline 2D:
– but even if I set my scene to Auto it doesn’t works
– when you scene is set to Spline 2D it doesn’t work eitherI tried to start from your sample scene and do the following:
– create a 2nd Helix, shift it a little bit
– convert both helix into 2 splines
– select both and use Connect Object + Delete to create 1 spline, that is build form the 2 Helix shapes
– use this 1 new Spline as the Hair Guides Link object, set it to Spline Guides, set hairs to Auto – the Hair distribution is ok, but the dispalcement animation doesn’t workscreenshot: 10430_splineguideshairstyle.jpg.zip
scene with 2 Helixes: 10432_10418splinehairdisplacementtrial2helixes.c4d.zip
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using Spline 2D on splines created from Edge to Spline
10433_splinehairdisplacementtrial2spline2d.c4d.zip
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Thank you, I really appreciate it. Unfortunately your scene doesn’t not work:
1) the hair is not distributed between / around the 4 lines created from the edges of a cube
see my screenshot when I open the scene:
10436_scene2startingstate.jpg.zip2) the hair animation/movement is not driven by the displacement texture noise, but by dynamics being enabled. When I switch them of nothing moves
3) in your scene Hair Guides Roots are set to ‘Spline 2D’ and Hair Roots to ‘Auto’. That’s not what I need, maybe that’s what causing problem described in point 1) see the screenshot above. For my hair styles to work I need Hair Guides to be set to ‘Spline Guides’ and that Hair Roots set to ‘Spline 2D’ to get a good hair style.
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I’d have to see your scene file (or at least the hair splines copy/pasted to a new file)
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Thank you for your interest and time, I appreciate it.
Here is my hairstyle scene: 10439_splinehairdisplacementanimation.c4d.zip
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If I change your hair to be Spline2D I get displacement – not that I like the motion and I don’t have the time right now to find good settings. If you still don’t get movement I can only suspect there has been a fix in the Displacement channel between R14 and R17.
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Thank you, for your time, I really appreciate it. I will check it out.
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nope, the R14 maybe not working isn’t it. I just opened it up in R14 and Spline2D and Displace works there too.
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had another thought, don’t know what kind of motion you want but to me the Displacer deformer would give better motion (more controllable anyway). The problem is controlling whether the roots are affected. Here’s a simple example with the Displacer with a linear falloff on the smallest chunk of hair for a test.
10450_splinehairdisplacementanimation2.c4d.zip
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