Quote - Something I've realised just lately is that sims tend to run much more quickly under certain circumstances, one being in a fresh load of Poser.

Also the dynamics are far smoother and quicker if the hair strands (certainly within groups) are not tangled or touching each other at the start of a sim. This is easier said than done if you've styled the hair extensively to start with.

With long hair I've been using fewer verts per hair (20 or 30) for the sim, baking them with Cages script and then increasing the verts. This probably isn't of use to animators unless it can be automated to bake each frame (not even sure if that's possible).

That makes a lot of sense, but it's really hard to achieve using the limited styling controls.  In fact, it makes perfect sense.  I've noticed I can lock poser up easily by simply running a hair simulation with collissions and have the hair start inside the body.  Locks up, every time (on OSX - says app not responding - maybe it's just super slow?)

If worst comes to worst, couldn't you brute force the baking on a frame by frame?  I mean, run the simulation in draft mode, use a script to export each frame of hair as it's own prop running it through cage's script.  Then, when it comes time to final render, you run another script that advances the frames, loads the frame hair prop, change the verts, render, rinse repeat :)

The second script loads each frame to render, it loads the correct frame hair prop, makes the vert change, renders, then goes to next frame?  It could dump those frames to the queue manager which would still kick them out to different network render nodes a'la a normal animation.

 

Wait, can we even access the queue manager via python?  I though we couldn't, in PP2010.  I suppose it's possible to figure out the inputs to the queue manager and call it as an external command.

Or, can you export the hair simulation frame geometry in such a way that you can load that information back into the prop at the correct frame?  I haven't looked into what a hair simulation looks like at a file level.