The Snazzies: Slinky Nhair Tests

Hey Catherine,

As we discussed on the Phone the Nhair option is not viable for this particular stage in the project mainly because of its tax on mid range computers. On your reply email you also mentioned that this would make the download more intense. It wouldn't, the only thing that determines a videos download rate is the quality of the video. Everything is composited before then and used to create the short or VLog entry.

You may have to wait for these animated gifs to load to appreciate them properly.

The gif above is the default application of the nhair system. As you can imagine the only thing calculated initially is the gravity of the hair which you can alter by changing the gravity amount or altering the tensile strength of the hair. These hairs can be turned into mesh shapes (which can be changed into a shape similar to a feather. This was nice but as I said it slows the viewport and will be a nightmare for animation.

The gif above shows the forces that can be applied to the hair. You can turn on wind which reacts in addition to the gravity in the scene. Like I told you on the phone it is all very clever stuff. The problem as I mentioned is the more stuff you introduce to the scene the slower the scene gets bogged down. Its because it has to calculate a lot of things so it makes workflow quite hard unless you are on a high end machine.

Last but not least is the collision object settings which tell the hair that it cannot go through certain things. In the gif above I added collision to the body mesh and you can just see that the hair hits it but will not go through it. You may also notice that the scene is moving slower... that is the viewport lag I was talking about. If too much goes on my machine cannot handle it.

Anyway I thought I'd give you a bit of a looksee at the possibilities.
Like you said maybe in the future you can look at this method.

xXStItChXx