Xgen Hair - Wind Animation?

[Elcono]

Hello there everyone!

I was trying to animate my hairstyle in the wind using the AnimWire modifier and the Wind modifier but there aren´t any tutorials for what I have in mind and the documentation page about the modifiers isn´t very helpful.

So, here is what my hairstyle looks like:

As you can see, it is short and has locks.

The kind of hairstyle that you would achieve in real life by styling the hair using some sort of hair spray so that the hair would hold its shape even in windy conditions.

So I want it to move in the wind but it needs to retain its shape.

- I have the AnimWire modifier all set up but the magnitude scale is set to 0 across the entire length of the hairstyle.

This is because anything higher deforms the hairstyle as the hair primitives start to fall down because they are trying to follow the curves.

I don´t know if I´m doing this right here but I don´t know how else to prevent the hair from losing its initial shape during animation. (maybe some settings in the nhair system?)

Here´s what I mean.

As you can see when I play the animation, if the magnitude was not at 0, the hair primitives would try to follow the blue curves and I really do not want that.

Try to imagine that the orange guides are locks of hair styled like that.

They should slightly stretch and react to forces such as wind as real hair would, but you do not expect them to fall down all over your face and straighten entirely like that.

- And the wind modifier is just something strange and mysterious to me.

The modifier applies a wind force right after you turn it on. And the guides are not moving in the wind, just the primitives.
I don´t know whether thats supposed to happen or not.

Anyways, I set the stiffness in the Wind modifier to 0.7 and this seems to be a nice value for this hairstyle, the overall shape is pretty good as it moves in the wind.

But here is what I want to know,

how do I actually animate the hair using this modifier?

Lets say I do not want any wind at frame 1, then at frame 10 it starts getting windy and at frame 25 the wind will be the strongest and then the strength of the wind will gradually decrease until its completely gone and the hair is in its initial state again.

My first thought was to just key frame the attributes in the wind modifier such as conts strength and gust strength at values I want but I did not figure out how to do this and I have no idea whether there actually is a way or not.

Anyways I´d like to achieve something like this - https://vimeo.com/120261555

I know that there is also a way to animate the wind using just nhair as it was described in this tutorial on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Z-GqAfWqU

But this is not being done using the animwire modifier and thus the primitives do not collide with the mesh AND the hair does not retain its shape at all.

It is completely straight as it blows in the wind and this is not what I want for my hairstyle.

Okay I´m curious if anybody can actually come up with any tips and tricks how to do this : )

Thanks in advance and have a wonderful day!

[Anonymous]

Lol - good question - long time in reply - I think I may have found a solution.

Do not use Animwires, use the wind modifier.  It does not do anything until you turn ON Loopable down at the bottom.

Extend the frame range to more than your frame range - then reduce the Loop Noise Span - I figure that the 3D noise moves over your hair 10 times by default - I reduced to 1 and my grass tips moved very gently.

Now I am adding it to hair on my character.  Hopefully this works.

C

[Michael_Todd]

The problem is not with the animwire modifier, but with the settings on the nHair system.  Please bear in mind that XGen has NO internal notion of simulation of dynamics. The animwire and control wire modifiers are essentially deformers applying the deformation on live or cached dynamic curves to the primitives in a groom. All the dynamics and how the curves move under simulation is dependent on the dynamic settings of the system driving the curves, which in Maya, by default, is nHair and Nucleus.

Cheers

[Anonymous]

Yes - I had the modifiers baked...  had to delete that and use the nHair curves as animation.  My bad - too many things going on.  Concentration not spot on today - Got it working.

That explanation was great as well!

Thanks

C