How do games animate Hair? Example Breath of the wild wind effects

Unity Engine
1

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to animate hair. I don’t see tutorials and the only one I do see is a paid asset. Is low poly , or any hair animation for that matter, so difficult? Or could the unity joints have something to do with them?

2

There is many way, and it depend on what type of hair.
Typical is just to use a bone, and animate the bone either through typical animation or procedurally with code or physics. Vertex animation is also possible, in unique cases even blendshape, and combining all of the technique is possible too. So you should look for vertex animation and just plain animation. Then it will depend on your hair style. SO it’s not really about hair animation, just animation.

3

Interesting. Yes I did think of plain animation, but I guess I was thinking about the natural movements like bounciness when running but I guess all that can be put into the animation for performance. Thank you for your input though. I was curious about the joints on Unity however. Would that be useful for animating hair bones?(GameObjects in Unity)

4

You can use physics on bones, that’s how ragdoll are done, and ponytail generally, so just try.

5

I would say to make the poly hair, in one of those 3d modelling software, like softimage xsi, blender, or 3dsmax etc, bone rig it there and animate it there. Then, import the hair models and animation into Unity.

Unfortunately, my pc has been down for a while, so I can’t show you in a vid.:face_with_spiral_eyes:

6

I already got the poly hair, with bones and all. I was hoping for some kind of organic movement or something like getting affected by wind? Or gravity? How’s that accomplished you think?

7

I’ll certainly take a look at the ragdoll physics. Honestly the hair isn’t a priority thing just something fancy. I was just fishing to see if there’s a neat Unity feature I didn’t catch online or some technique someone has found regarding polygonal hair. I am not a fan of the overly realistic looking hair as that won’t work with Low poly.

8

There’s no built-in hair, but there is a cloth simulation:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-Cloth.html
Depending on the shape of the hair and the type of movement you want, you might be able to implement (fake) the hair as cloth.

9

Initially I did look up the Cloth component class. I think initially I was looking at it wrong. Perhaps if I use planes (as cloths work better with flat surfaces than polygonal hair like spiky quads), and add cloth simulation to the plane with a 2D hair texture, that might work - did I get it right?