Cineversity

I’m a regular to the program today.  Thanks in advance for any help.  I have objects with hair on them.  When I put these objects inside an emitter, the hair disappears.  When I make the hair a child of the object, the hair is restored, but loses all of its dynamic properties.  Do any of you know how to get hair to behave properly when it exists on an object inside an emitter?

Hi Mark_S_Johnson,

Asking for simple and procedural solutions… : Not to my knowledge.

The first problem is given in the fact that the child objects are cloned. Which means that the child is processed and then cloned. The cloning ends the process of anything, as it is a copy. The work around is possible with applying Hair in some cases to the overall group of clones, if they are stable in count.

Since we have with particles often a highly changing number of “clones”, this process isn’t working.

The idea would be to create a lot of single units of this, e.g., a null as parent, holding the Hair and the object), and transfer then the position (via iteration) to those single units. The problems here, the particles die and change so the index number, and with that the index is not stable to a position. One could think to create a matrix with those positions and transfer such thing to a spline or something like that. But there is, so far my experiments, always some movement, which affects the dynamic of Hair. Since the number is changing as well, the reminding objects needs a special treatment. This could be a transfer to the needed emitter position while invisible, to calm down, until they are needed. There are options to give each particle (Thinking Particles) a unique ID. But there are more problems than that.

Given the Dynamic effect of the object as well the Hair Dynamic, placing them at the same position, while in waiting position seems problematic. Dynamic solvers needs to be turned off, switching them on might cause movement …

Given the use of standard particles, the access to the inner working information seems quite difficult (C.O.F.F.E.E. or Python). So Thinking Particles perhaps.

Much easier seemed to be the way to Trace the Particles via MoGraph tracer, and have then the before mentioned “units” traveling along such Splines. Since they produce per frame one vertices, the only problem is that these vertices start with the born event of a particle, and not with frame zero.

I have no solution that works with a few clicks. Sorry.

All the best

Hi Doc.  I’m in the process of eliminating the emitters altogether and working with gravity objects instead.  I think this will work…fingers crossed.  Thank you for your help!

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the update. I was just playing again with particles and hair, just trying to convince it…(no luck so far)

However, to support your exploration, here is a simple set up, jsut freshly set up after I saw your post. It has a MoGraph Dynamic [cached] base, and uses then Xpresso to take the information from MoGraph to move things around with single “Sphere/Hair” units.

Have a look, just press “play”.

Let me know if there is any question or idea you would like to have discussed.

All the best

Scene File:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/RGlWwxJkKsV9V1mWjBE31GZLpn0fLkeydqhhqjlGKVB?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy

Thank for all of your help, Doc!  I was able to accomplish what I wanted using Gravity objects.  I’m excited to have discovered a successful workaround.  Have a beautiful day!

You’re very welcome, Mark!
Thanks again for the nice feedback.
My best wishes for your project.