Hey,

i have a wolf character rigged up with maya fur all over the body and a hair system to make it dynamic. The hair system works great with the wolf in his static pose, it flops around and the fur follows well. But i am not sure how to make the hair curves follow with his mesh when he moves.

I know with hair systems on a characters head you can constrain the curves to an object following the head, and the hair will move with the head. However the mesh the hair/fur is attached to is deforming, so i can’t parent it to a specific object or curve because the whole hair system will follow that point instead of the right spot on his body. I need the curves to deform with the mesh.

Here’s an image, you can see when i lift his arm the blue curves stay behind.

any ideas? thanks guys

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And a render, the fur looks good but is not dynamic due to this problem.

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you should be able to use a wrap deformer on all of the input curves (not the dynamic ones), and as they follow the mesh, so will the dynamic curves :)

there are other ways, probably better ways, which i think involve forward planning before creating the hair curves, using follicles which are automatically constrained to the skin, but i cant think atm how to do so, i think its fairly simple. however the wrap should work fine, just remember to tone the influenced area right down to speed the deformer up.

Lee Dunham | Character TD
ldunham.blogspot.com

actually i’ve just had a better look at the initial pic and it looks like your input curves are following the mesh, just not the dynamic curves, which is actually what happens with dynamics. they need to be calculated during playback. so try using interactivePlayback in the dynamic/fur shelf, and when you move the rig, the hair should follow.

to adjust the rig’s starting pose (with the hair following the mesh), you’ll want to adjust the start frame for the hairsystem to the frame your adjusting the pose on (default is 1 and i recommend it tbh), so put your current frame to frame 1 and try to adjust your pose again.

Lee Dunham | Character TD
ldunham.blogspot.com

thanks for the suggestions! i got it working with folicles finaly.

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