The lovely 'Betty' models her new hairdo for us:

http://www.youtube.com/user/campydoodles#p/a/u/0/97n_qtNRYhs

This is a sample made in A:M V 15.0i with some (in my opinion) pretty good collision detection. If you ever search Youtube for 'CGI Dynamic hair' and peruse all the samples good and bad you may have noticed this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-uUavvjGGo

That was made in either LW or XSi...it was the basis for my test...a basic 'head-shake'. I'd like to share my 'findings' on this in hopes of inspiring others to try putting dynamic hair on their characters OR to find someone else who knows a better way to go about this.

For your perusal. EDIT: Now in PDF file format!

Oh nice info! Thanks Mr. Big Bootay!

I have Acrobat at home...all I have here at work is Pshop, which can't publish multiple page PDF's. I plan to pull those down this evening and replace with a PDF.

That's great R&D , Matt!

And good looking hair, too!

OpenOffice can do multi-page pdf i believe.

John
(correct me if I am wrong) Your example above is a cartoon look or at least lighting wise not photo realistic at all. The other example is, at least lighting wise. They may be using Ambient O or radiosity. But My problem with AM hair is that it always looks cartoonish. I cant seem to get the look of the second example. Hair in AM Does not seem to be effected by Ambient O.

Am I wrong?

Basically what I am saying is how do you get hair to not look cartoonish if you are going for a realistic look in AM? It seems to work great if you are going for the cartoonish pixar look that John so elegantly models.

Great test, Matt!

I should clarify that I was not trying to entirely 'ape' the other video, I used my own character and the lighting was mostly default...the real test was to get hair to obey the simple laws of collision detection...which has actually eluded me for quite some while and I finally got some settings that seem to work. I find the term 'photoreal' has many definitions... that other test does not look photoreal to me. If I had a more realisitic character I would adjust mainly the hair thickness to thinner and the amount to higher, but I don't know if that would pass.

It is now a PDF!

yes.

Matt's test is mostly about the motion of the hair and it's working real well. That's the kind of stuff Pixar spent millions to get working for "Incredibles" and here it is in A:M for next to nothing.

But did you notice the other test is just black hair, much easier to shade than the blonde that matt did, and that hides the fact that it's still giant yarn strands, practically octopus tentacles. It's like she's got a licorice wig.



I don't know the specific answer to that but I know people have been saying for years that AM cloth couldn't be used for anything more than a flag but now that I've tried it myself I know those people were just lame pussies lacking in the patience to do incremental experimentation and learn from it and they just gave up after the first try.

I'll bet you a quarter that A:M Hair is like that. There are probably a 1000 things you can do with hair and what Matt's shown here makes me think the others are possible too. It's just waiting to be discovered.

I'm a little embarassed by how much time I actually put into getting those settings just so. I hope other people can take advantage of it.

Thank you Matt!
Your test looks great!

Michel

Thanks for your time and hard work very imformative!!!

Another character:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnPCEDtDCW8
Bunny!

Woohoo some mighty fine hair and the dynamics are perfect ,nice one

Woohoo, some mighty fine ah... ahem...and the dynamics are perfect, too, nice one.

excellent pdf and test Matt, thank you - I will definitely have to try collision detection someday

(this should be in the tutorial section)

nice , Thank you

very well done and Thanks for share John...

John Bigboote, Dude your models are HOT!!!
Nice.