My colleague Mathieu wrote a little explanation not long ago. Allow me
to copy/paste his writings.
Using hair with Syflex can look a bit perillous at first for stability
issues and such but in all the research that was done in this department
so far, even though we really couldn't say that this is the perfect
solution, it is definitely the most stable an efficient one. The basic
concept is to have Syflex drive a simulation of a mesh object (we
usually use low poly-count cylinders) from which you extract a curve.
Now you need to have a few of those and you can then create a hair
strand from these curves. The reason why we called this the solution
"The good solution...for now..." is that this type of system is rather
heavy and requires a bit of scripting knowledge to be able to use it
efficiently. One thing that would make it much lighter would be if we
could put Syflex dynamics on the curves themselves instead of having to
drive these curves by meshes that are simulated. We know that Syflex is
planning to have this feature implemented but we have no release date
yet. Many other things on our side could be done to improve this system.
Among others, finding a good method to manage the overwhelming amount of
cache files that such a system can generate would be a good starting
point for someone wanting to make the system better! As an exemple, the
system used for one of our characters was composed of over 45 objects
receiving simulation. This means that for every frame simulated, you
have over 45 files that are created. Managing all these in shots that
were sometimes over 500 frames was definitely a challenge and pretty
well demonstrated that tools need to be created in order to make this
task less of a burden.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On Behalf
Of Greg Smith
Sent: May 17, 2006 3:32 PM
To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
Subject: RE: (hair) A dreaded hair question, and I don't mean Bob
Marley.
care to be specific?
On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 15:15 -0400, Marc-Andre Carbonneau wrote:
> Ours too.
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
>
> From:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM [mailto:owner-xsi(at)Softimage.COM] On
> Behalf Of Ben Barker
> Sent: May 17, 2006 3:00 PM
> To: XSI(at)Softimage.COM
> Subject: Re: (hair) A dreaded hair question, and I don't mean Bob
> Marley.
>
>
>
>
> My workaround is Syflex.
>
>
>
>
> On 5/17/06, Greg Smith <greg(at)stanwinston.com> wrote:
>
> Okay I know that XSI's hair leaves much to be desired (very much
> indeed). However its been my duty for the past couple of days to get
> a
> better understanding of how hair works in XSI, and how difficult it is
> to push it to the breaking point (which is not all that hard, just add
> Dynamics). So that said, I was wondering if anyone had figured out
> how
> to get decent performance out of the dynamics without having the guide
> hairs emmiting in positive y axis, get fubared. It seems that, with
> gravity applied, the desired stiffness settings and dampening result
> in
> guide hairs collapsing in an accordian fashion, which sometimes
> results
> in the segments spinning. Now I am no expert of hair digital or real
> (hair styling just never perked my interest as a kid), however
> observing
> hair in the real world, I never really seen hair collapse on itself
> the
> way it does in XSI. Its as if each child segment, has no real
> corresponding angular relationship with its parent segment. So when
> put
> in a situation where it falls upon itself, its every segment for
> itself.
> Again I am no expert, and I am sure there's more than meets the eye,
> when it comes to all this.
>
> So if anyone has work-arounds or tips to tame this beast, that would
> be
> mucho appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Greg
>
> ---
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>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ben Barker
> Hair/Fur
> Omation
>
>
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