I'm using nHair to simulate the motion of a biceps muscle, and I've gotten it working pretty well. But there is still a bit of ripple that I want to eliminate.
Here is a video demonstrating it. You can see that it works fine when the arm is moving slowly, but starts rippling a lot more when the arm moves quickly.
I want the upper hair to take up the slack instantaneously, such that there is no ripple. I have an expression controlling the Rest Length Scale so that it changes dynamically to always create tension, but this has not entirely solved the problem. I also have a high Damp value, which helps a lot, but its effectiveness is still dependent on the speed of the arm motion.
I think the rippling is due mainly to the inertia of the hair systems. I tried making Mass insignificantly small, but that causes the stretch dynamics to whack out, so I am forced to leave it at 0.1.
Is there any way to cause these hair systems to act like a perfectly taut rubber band, with no wiggling whatsoever? That should be relatively simple computationally, but I don't know if Maya supports it. It would be nice if there was just an option for turning off inertia entirely.
Here are the settings: