Animating CC Hair

[Mike Park]

I am not sure what your problem is. I am assuming you applied cc sphere to a flat layer and keyframed the rotation value under the transform rollout. This should rotate the texture on the ball. Next, if you duplicate the layer and apply cc hair to the layer, you should see just hair. If you keyframe the rotation of this layer, the hair should rotate also. For ease use, i would pickwip the rotation of the hair layer to the rotation of your sphere layer so they always stay the same. If you are still having problems or if I have completely misunderstood what you are trying to do, let me know.

[Eric Mousel]

Mike, I think we perfectly understand each other but the problem is that, unexpectedly, the hair does not rotate when animated separately, pickwhipped or otherwise. That’s what’s got me so confused.

I tried it again last night using two simple Solids. I applied CC Sphere to both layers and added CC Hair to just one (effectively making it just a sphere of hair). It looked right but after animating the sphere itself and parenting the hair to it, the hair still stood in place. I used expressions to pick whip the individual rotation values of the hair to the sphere and that didn’t work either.

Eric Mousel
Creative Services Producer
ABC17/FOX38/MyZOU32/ABC StrmTrk 24/7

[Mike Park]

That seems strange. If you want to send me you comp to take a look at, I would be happy to try to troubleshoot. It appears that you are doing everything correctly.

[Jens Enqvist]

I think I know what you mean and I’m afraid that it is stretching the 2D option a little too much. There might be a way to get the hair to follow the rotation of the sphere but it would only move in 2D so I’m not sure how good it would look and it would require some work. My suggestion would have to be to do it in a 3D application if you want the best result.

[Mike Park]

This problem intrigued me, so I had to find the answer.
I came up with 3 basic possibilities.

1. Use a 3d program
2. Add texture to your ball map in photoshop or in a precomp in after effects or
3. Use a work around that I came up with

The tutorial, complete with texture maps, very basic instructions and the afx comp itself can be found here:

https://www.mediafire.com/?lnninw930jt

If you have any questions, please let me know. Also, since I took the time to figure this out, please let me know if you found it useful and let me see your final result

Cheers

[Eric Mousel]

Mike,

First, thanks for going above and beyond to help me out, I appreciate it immensely. Unfortunately it’s still not working and I’ve concluded that CC Hair cannot be manipulated in 3D space. Your tutorial was great but the rotation was only in 2D space. I keyed the motion of my tennis ball using the rotation values (x,y,z) of CC Sphere. CC Hair just didn’t seem to want to move in 3D space.

If you rotate a layer with CC Sphere using the effect’s X,Y,Z rotation values you get a pretty sweet 3D rotating ball.
If you apply CC Hair it just doesn’t follow along. Even with matching keyframes or expression pick whipping.

Thanks again for all your help. I want to keep working on this because I still think there’s some weird solution to it but my next two weeks will be 12 hour days and several of my clients are currently using me for a punching bag, including the one for this spot.

Eric Mousel
Creative Services Producer
ABC17/FOX38/MyZOU32/ABC StrmTrk 24/7