Animating hair and then making it fall out naturally

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Looks to me like you have to do it this way:

1. Got to Hair Edit (simulate menu) and run the unroot guides command;
2. In the Hair object dynamics tab, uncheck “fixed roots”;
3. Animate the “hold roots” parameter to make the hair fall out.

[Scott Green]

It still doesn’t seem to be working:

And I think I’ve followed your instructions correctly:

I also ran the unroot guides command in the Hair Edit (simulate menu).

I’ve uploaded my project file if that’ll help?
8581_hair.c4d.zip

Thanks Adam.

Splurj Creative, Video Production, Motion Graphics & Animation in Manchester UK.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Ah, I was looking at the guides which do fall off, but in order for the hairs themselves to fall you have to set the hair roots (Hairs tab) to As Guides. That will reduce your hair amount to the number of guides you’re using, but you can fill it back out by using hair clones (also in the Hairs tab).

Try this one: 8584_hairamt.c4d.zip

I also add hair collision tags to the S and floor.

[Scott Green]

That works perfectly, thanks Adam.

What would I need to look at in order to say make the hairs sort of ‘explode’ out from the S shape and then float down to the ground more naturally?

Like when something bad happens to Tweety Bird and you get a puff of feathers that float down. That’s the only good example I can think of right now 🙂

Splurj Creative, Video Production, Motion Graphics & Animation in Manchester UK.

[Adam Trachtenberg]

You can use the effectors from the standard particle system to influence hair. So you might use the attractor (negative value) or turbulence in force mode, or negative gravity … or some combination. Simplest way would be to keyframe the effectors’ “enable” parameter, but you could also do strength, falloff, etc.