[Brian Jones]

hard to know without seeing the scene file but if it’s a detailed object with a ton of polys it’s going to take some time. Is it a full detail pillow (not modelled with SubD for smoothing)? Is it landing on a simple object or another softbody?

[Brian Jones]

the underlying mesh needs to be pretty clean to work well, check out this thread https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/19/890909#890914

[Brian Jones]

never seen anything like it, what happens if you disable OpenGL?

[Brian Jones]

can’t combine soft body dynamics with pose morph, but you could use soft body to get the final shape you want, Cache the Dynamics, go the the frame where the shape is right and do a Current State to Object – then take the dynamics tag off the new object. Use that as a new pose morph target.

[Brian Jones]

the preview (Editor) render is different (faster) than the picture viewer render. To make it faster some things are assumed or missed or there are settings (ie. in the SubD/Metaball objects there are settings for Editor or Renderer – by default always lower for editor). Ddynamics/particles are always something to be cautious with as well – in the Editor the render always starts without calculating particle/dynamic movement. If you jump around in the timeline dynamics are either ignored or make a best guess but if you render in the picture viewer it always runs the calculations from the start first to arrive at a frame (which is why the editor doesn’t do “Preparing…” for dynamics but the Picture Viewer does). Hair is another dynamics system, it’s been a while since I did much hair so I don’t remember where the problem lies except to say that you have to do Picture Viewer renders to test and never rely solely on the Editor renders until you want to do a final whenever any dynamics etc are involved

[Brian Jones]

don’t know it that can be done with hair, Length in the hair material grows the apparent length along the guide (much like animating the growth along a sweep) but it follows whatever the guide is already doing, it is not growing the guide. The length of the guides (Guides/Roots) can be set but not keyframed – I don’t see a way around that.
It would be possible to fake it with particles perhaps (emit from the mesh and put the particles in a Trail object to which you add a hair material to render) but that wouldn’t have hair dynamics to move the hair behind the ‘growing end’ as real hair would…

[Brian Jones]

you can put Booles inside of Booles (and Connects to join things that don’t touch but need to both be cut from something)

in your case (judging from the first image) you want

Boole (A without B)
–Sphere
–Boole (A Union B)
—-Torus (big one – slice)
—-Connect
——Torus (small one on one side)
——Torus (other small one on other side)
Sphere (with the glow texture)

The connect assumes you have a round (torus) cut on the side of the sphere we can’t see.

[Brian Jones]

depends on whether you are looking for real-time speed or slo-mo and whether the bubbles are small (spherical) or large enough to have trouble maintaining a spherical shape. Bubbles break so fast that unless you are going slo-mo it would maybe be better to have the bubble disappear and generate a small burst of tiny particles at that same location

[Brian Jones]

pose morphs are like PLA as far as I know so changing point counts would be fatal I would think. Highlighting would be probably better done with textures

[Brian Jones]

can you post your scene file (just after the hair disappears)