Add nHair dynamics to animated guides

 
 
 

You can use nucleus dynamics to animate hair with Maya Fields and forces.

NoteWhen you use this method all hair influenced by XGen guides is dynamic. There is no way to exclude guides from the animation.

To add nHair dynamics to animated guides:

  1. Load a polygon object into the scene. (This worklfow uses a head and illustrates hair but the same techniques apply to adding dynamics to grass.)
  2. Open the XGen window, if it is not open already. (XGen > Open the XGen Window).
  3. Select the polygon surface or faces and click Create New Description. A Description is a pattern for generating primitives. See Create XGen Descriptions.
  4. Click the Update The XGen Preview button and turn on Update Preview Automatically so you can see the guides when they animating the simulation,. To show only the guides updating, set the preview density to 0. This speeds playback as it only draws the guides.
  5. Once your XGen Description is created, select the Add or Move Guides tool and place a few guides on the scalp.
  6. To shape the guides so you can create a hair style, select all the guides and go to the Utilities tab and select the Guides as Curves utility. Also see Shape guides for information on how to control the direction of your XGen guides.
  7. Once you have a shape you like, and are ready to animate the guides, select the Primitives tab and go to the Guide Animation section.
  8. Turn on the Use Animation option, and click Create Hair System in the Guide Animation section.
  9. In the Make Curves Dynamic Options window that appears, select NURBS curves as your output and turn on all the options.
  10. Click Make Curves Dynamic. This generates the Hair System, including the output curves, and Nucleus solver. The mesh is converted to a passive collision object.
  11. To view the animation, in the Outliner window, expand hairSystemOutputCurves and select all the curves.
    NoteMake sure that the Primitive Bound field in the Preview/Output tab is set to a value greater than 1.0.
  12. With hairSystemOutputCurves still selected, click Attach Hair System in the Guide Animation section.
  13. You can now animate the Hair system by applying different behaviors to the spline primitives using Fields,

    You can now animate the AnimWires by applying different behavior to the spline primitives in the Modifiers tab, such as Wind .
  14. Set the timeline to at least 1000 frames and click Play.

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