Workflow is smooth if you keep only what you're working on visible, and only turning it all on when necessary for render. 

Hair styling tools are a bit clunky and hand grenade-esque, but better than nothing.

I found that hair strands can also be shaped with magnets, which I'm infinitely more precise with.

Quote - I found that hair strands can also be shaped with magnets, which I'm infinitely more precise with.

I think the morph brush also works, but is extremely unwieldy for that purpose.  :unsure:

Are you keeping the magnets on the hair, or spawning morph targets?  Either way, how does the result handle when you run dynamics?  I would assume that magnet shaping might lead to an uneven distribution of vertices along the length of the hair.  Does that affect the dynamics at all? 

Well, I'm not sure exactly.  I'm not running dynamics; I've abandoned the dynamic aspect of dynamic hair.  It's just too buggy, these simulations.  I am rendering an example of what happens when you take a styled, finished hair like the one I've posted and then run a 15 frame simulation on a different pose.

The sims on the five or six groups went pretty quickly for 15 frames.  So, if it had worked out right, It would be worth the wait.  But what I'm seeing so far is a god-awful mess.

Wow...that hair looks great. Better than any mess I could make...lol.

Laurie

That's beautiful.  It looks so real!

Well, turns out it's not that hard to do.  Once you understand the workflow the hair room expects from you, it's pretty easy if not time consuming. 

Next I intend to muck around with curl and twist and see how that goes. 

Has anyone been able to prevent collisions from folding up the hair into an accordion in simulations?  I've tweaked everything and tried every combination I can think of and every sim ends up the same...every vertice turns into a zig-zag accordion even though I've got no kink, bend resistance, dampening, whatever...

Quote - Has anyone been able to prevent collisions from folding up the hair into an accordion in simulations?  I've tweaked everything and tried every combination I can think of and every sim ends up the same...every vertice turns into a zig-zag accordion even though I've got no kink, bend resistance, dampening, whatever...

How much did you use magnets to shape the hair?  If the vertices aren't evenly spaced along the lengths of the hairs, the dynamics would presumably give uneven (even moreso than usual) results.  And if you used magnets, how are those deformations being kept in place on the hair?  Morphs?  A baked geometry?  Or are the magnets still attached?

A script could go through the hairs and space the vertices evenly, after magnet deformation has been applied.  My path scripts do a lot of that.

As I understand it, the hair is basically a system of virtual springs, with a "spring" between each pair of neighboring vertices.  The response of each spring will vary depending on how far apart the paired vertices are.  If the springs in a given hair are of different lengths, the hair won't behave as intended.

This is without magnets or morphs or anything.

Could it just be I need to give the sim more frames to work with?  I'll try that.  Script, eh?  I guess that's my next move.

Quote - Could it just be I need to give the sim more frames to work with?  I'll try that.  Script, eh?  I guess that's my next move.

Impressive work.  Those hair styling tools are daunting.  :thumbupboth:

How many verts-per-hair are you using?  How many frames are in your simulation?  Do you have an image of the bad results?

This is where I'm at now.  Notice the scrunching going on at the scalp, and the sphagetti occuring in the traps.  This should be straight hair falling naturally into a nice, straight place.

I think it was suggested in another thread that one should try adding a wind deformer (force field, whatever they call them), to see improved dynamic results.  I've had tolerably decent dynamics with wind, using the Alyson Long hair in a 30 frame simulation.  Perhaps you could open that one up and study its settings.

I've possibly answered my own question...it would seem that one shouldn't be in a big hurry to screw with the gravity settings.  I cranked up the gravity expecting the extra "Weight" of the hair to straighten it out when all Gravity does is make the sim skip frames it needs to do more precise calculations.

Also, I definately need more frames. 

playing with using haircombs to sprout hair.  following advice to make the root/tip smaller value.

lil animation test here if you want to d/l to see.

http://realmsandgalaxies.com/P7/dynhair.wmv  792kb

needs air damping? less spring?  tee hee  even a head banging glam hair band isn't so .. frictionless.

i'm a lil freaked out by the way base of Jame's neck bends