Friday, December 18, 2009

Maya - Rigging a dynamic hair system (or one hair anyways)

Here is a video about how to set up a rig for a strand of hair (or anything else that requires some dynamic simulation, like a tail or a wire or whatever). The basic concept is to use an IK spline and blend shapes to get a rig that is fully blend-able between dynamic and manual animation and still give full control over the dynamic component of the rig. It's a bit long (about 40 min), but has the theory behind the rig and pretty much the full setup in Maya.

Maya Rigging: Dynamic/Manual Hair Setup

6 comments:

  1. HI SIR,
    Thanks for the tut, it worked like wonder for me. I am facing an issue for which m needing ur assistance. when m applying smooth node to the skin, the dynamic hair starts to jitter, Any solutions?..

    Thanks.
    Yuvi.

    ReplyDelete
  2. HI SIR,
    Thanks for the tut, it worked like wonder for me. I am facing an issue for which m needing ur assistance. when m applying smooth node to the skin, the dynamic hair starts to jitter, Any solutions?..

    Thanks.
    Yuvi.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Yuvi. It jitters in the renders? Not in Maya right now, but the first thing I'd look at is making sure that it's not just in your viewport/graphics card. Then maybe changing the input order of the smooth to see if that helps (don't know what else you have in the scene).
    I don't know that that specific issue has happened to me, so hard to say. . . Let me know what you find out or if I can help.

    Z

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Zeth,

    first let me thank you, those tutorials of yours help me a lot.
    I've got a little question concerning this one:

    Did you use (for the single hair on your 'useful head') a straight curve to build the whole setup and afterwards shaped it using the 'manual curve controls'?

    The reason I'm asking is this: I tried the whole setup using a lowercase n shaped sort of curve.
    And it doesn't behave like I expected it. It doesn't move very smooth und is way too active/much bouncing around.

    Best regards,

    nik

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  5. Nik again ;-)

    I guess it was the 'damp' slider (set on 0). This one seems to become more important the more twisting the initial curve is.

    So as I increase this value I reduce the unwanted behaviour.

    Best regards...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hey Nik-

    Yeah, two things. . .
    1. I always try to model things "straight" so they deform correctly in ALL directions. But it's not the end of the world to model something in a specific pose if you're not going too far off of that pose.
    2. The nice part of using the method in the video is that a) you can pose stuff, but also b) you get the full power of the hair system, with loads of things to tweak. Sometimes I'll break out the more important attrs from the system and put them out in the rig for the animator to play with, sometimes I'll leave them be. . .

    Z

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