Using cloth simulation to do hairs - good idea?

News & General Discussion
1

My current game won’t have any need of hairs, but in future when I’ll have haired characters, I don’t want them to use 6 tons of hair gel, I want hair to seem more natural. So I wonder if modelling hair as separate object and then use cloth simulation on it would be a good idea for doing this.

2

I was thinking that a joint rig with configurable joints and rigid body colliders may work fairly well myself. I don’t know the current state of Cloth as once something fails me I do not go back and try to hack to to usability. It may be different in 5.x.

3

This is what I was thinking too. However, I was concerned about the amount you would need to make hair move in a realistic way. I supposes if you just had a pony tale it would be fine and easy to do but for more complex hair styles.

4

Better to rig it properly like the body and use the physics of your animation package for a much better performing and controlled look. Blendshapes can be used too.

1 Like
5

Cmon guys, get with the current technology: Legacy Tools for Graphics Developers | NVIDIA Developer

I heard it just plugs right into Unity! :wink:

1 Like
6

Must be brilliant for PS4 development. Oh wait.

7

This is likely the best current solution for run-time rendering at the moment. If we were talking about offline rendering, then there are a few much better solutions, even integrated into Blender, for hair simulation.

Remember that you can not only model hair just like anything else, but since we can easily use transparent/semi-transparent/alpha cut-out materials, you can slap the right hair texture on it and model accordingly. The texture can be a pretty low alpha, and the material could use an additive blending mode, so that the layers could add up into a good luck. At least, that is the way I would go about it. Then, the hair, either in the same material(via the new Standard Shader), or in a separate material, would still be a part of the body and the body’s skeleton. Then your animation software can do some cool things with it as part of the animations. You could also do some slight changes yourself similar to what coded IK does, modifying the bones a bit after Unity sets the animation. This would get you some change for wind, etc… if you really wanted that extra bit of polish.