Continuing Bathing Part 8: The Return of Hair Physics

Hope you enjoyed what the Beta is so far. It is rough on the edges and not representative of the full v0.5 release, which is normal business for these early pre-releases.

I have begun the last feature for bathing, which will be being able to wash Shinobu's hair. This means that her long wet hair strands must be interactive and able to be washed with shampoo. So the first step was to bring back hair physics.

Physics can be tough. I tried making my own solution since I can easily do 2D but my math for 3D constraints is weak. So I spent $10 on a Unity Asset for Dynamic Bones. It's a very common store asset and the de-facto for hair physics in VRChat avatars. However, this project until now has been made 100% from the ground up; textures, logic, models, sound, voice contracting, etc (so I can control all the code and understand performance). So naturally buying this asset made me feel icky inside. Nevertheless I modified the script's code to support what I wanted.

But first, the new hair physics:

The elasticity and stiffness values are still being tweaked. Right now it's too rubbery for my tastes. Dynamic Bones integrated pretty well with my code base and are built at runtime for customization (different hair modes).

Here is a first look at the new interactive hair physics:

It works very well with some existing behaviors like headpats:

You can grab any dynamic bone on her model and pull it around. Currently it is only grabbing the very tip so it looks a bit weird but I will be extending it to grab any bone along the bone chain.

This does open up new behavior possibilities, like bullying by hair pulling, but that will be saved for later (and is rude!).

The only hair based behavior in v0.5 will be when she is in the bathtub when she is using her wet hair model. I have to animate a few assets for this. Also have to think of shampoo mechanics, I already have a shampoo bottle model but I think I will replace it with a soap bar and a bucket as a shampoo bottle is too "modern" for this game's setting. The setting of this game is somewhere around the 1930's~1960's.

Lastly, in my downtime, I have begun formulating ideas for clothing customization which will come after bathing. I am rolling with the idea that I mentioned before with images that have texture data embedded in it. For easy clothing texture customization. More on that later though.

Oh and last weekend I did not make a new YouTube video. I felt like there wasn't enough content for one yet. However I will definitely make one after the shampoo mechanics.

Stay tuned.