Hi all. I've been trying to animate some hair on a character in 3dsMax using the Shag:Hair plugin, but I'm pulling out my OWN hair in the process. Can't seem to get it to do what I want. My dilemma is that I need the character to run her hands through her hair and have the hair react realisticly to that action. Having not used this Max plugin before, it's a little difficult to master here. Now here's where my Poser question comes in... I was speaking with a friend of mine who has said that Poser 5's dynamic hair seems much easier to use than Shag, but he doesn't know if it's capable of this kind of reaction... So I'm asking anyone who would know: CAN this be done in Poser 5 with it's dynamic hair? Or does the hair only react to forces like wind and gravity? I need the hair to react to the character's own hands as "deflectors", so it can appear as if she's running her hands through it naturally. If this can be done, are there tutorials on the subject to get a little head start on learning it, because it's for an upcoming project I have, and although I'm familiar to a degree with dynamics in 3ds, I've never used Poser 5. I've e had version 4 forever, but never had a reason to upgrade until NOW. Any help on this would be very appreciated.

That should work if you use collision detection on the hand, but I am no expert on poser 5 hair.

Hmmm. So there's a collision detection for bodyparts? But does it work with the hair too, or is it just there so bodyparts don't intersect each other when posing? I don't think poser4 has this option, so it sounds like it's dynamic specific.

Yes, the collision detection in Poser 5 can be turned on for the dynamic hair, and you can turn on collision detection for body parts and have them deform the hair as you describe. In my experience, the collision detection is not perfect and hair strands will pass through the hand. You may be able to work around this with suitable camera angles or by avoiding extreme closeups of the hair. Creating a decent hairstyle using dynamic hair is a bit of an art. P5 comes with some dynamic hairstyles for Judy and Don created by HMann and Neftis. Turning on the collision detection and calculating the dynamics is fairly trivial once you have your hair in place. Cheers, Poseur