Quote - I fixed the links for you Morkonan.  And I too would love to see more hair models that have the ability to move away from the neck.  It's just not logical to have a character thowing their head back with the hair stuck to the neck.  (and i hate magnets)  

You can accomplish that by adding morphs. Morphs alter the geometry, radically, and the mesh will obey the morph deltas. However, when the morph is radical and outside of the joint parameters or radically changes the object in some way, you can have problems.

For example, go grab Koz's Long Hair Evolution freebie. A google should turn it up. It's one of the nicest freebies ever and very versatile. IIRC, there are plenty of morphs in that hair that demonstrate the ease of moving hair away from the conformed joint.

Magnets can help, but they are going to fight with the joint parameters effecting the hair and any morphs that are currently active. Magnets work very well, but take some finessing, especially if you have several morphs to the geometry already active, as those take precedence and alter how the geometry is going to respond to a magnet.

One of the best things you can do is to create morphs to for your hair in order to satisfy your needs. Sometimes, this can be done with just some magnets. Other times, it requires a 3D modeller to get the morphs just right. It's easiest if the hair is all one group, that way you don't have to go through any lateral workflow in order to regroup the model, morph it, then reapply the original groups. (It's not difficult to do, it just takes some getting used to.)

One thing you can try with a magnet is to parent a magnet to the hair, hopefully it's all one group (neck) which is common, then place the magnet outside the boundaries of the geometry of the trailing ends of the hair (if it's long) with the falloff just on the edge of the geometry. Then, move the magnet so that the hair "swings" with it. It takes some finessing to get the location of the inner and outer zones aligned properly, without severely deforming the mesh. You usually have to move the magnet radically, since just a small amount of the total force is being transmitted, since you're depending entirely on "falloff" to do this. But, it can be done fairly quickly and yield hair that appears to flow appropriately with gravity, instead of just the neck joint it's conformed to. (This is similar to using helper bones in skirts, but here it's just a magnet. Active morphs may disrupt this, though.)

Lastly, in some hair, the joint parameters are such that the inner and outer zones of the neck joint parameters are almost larger than the screen... These respond.. funkily :) , to magnet and joint manipulation, so creating morphs for them is the easist way to get the look you want. (A few creators seem to favor this technique and it works very well. It just has problems when you're trying to manipulate it in ways it doesn't want to go. ;) )

 

PS - Tks for the linkfix. I knew I could have used the forum's link tool, but after blitzing through the post and just using standard BBCode, I didn't feel like going back and typing even more stuffs...