colortwist

Long hair rig viewport demo

Added 2020-05-30 11:06:58 +0000 UTC

Soooooo, yeah. This is more or less what I've been working on for the past 30 days.

I'm pretty sure this is a reasonably new and novel method for handling long hair rigging in a completely deterministic fashion- at least, I've never seen anything like it before.

In essence, this entire rig was designed from the ground up to be as automated as possible while still remaining fully tweakable in nearly every aspect. One of the things that I noticed while working with Jessica's character was how much more enjoyable the overall experience was, mostly because her hair style only involves dragging two control objects around in the viewport. There's no need to drop down into the hair toolkit and start sculpting hair styles by hand, which is a huge boon when you're trying to maintain immersion and really focus on the scene posing. I wanted to try and extend this experience to Vanessa's character as much as possible, precisely so that I didn't have to stop and re-sculpt her hair style after each and every pose.

This is the end result of that attempt.

The new rig leverages a heavily layered approach to building out the entire hair style automatically in realtime. It is capable of binding to a character and tracking around with the head, head + back, or head + shoulders + back (or any combination thereof). This allows the rig to unparent itself from the back or shoulders whenever required, which is useful for poses where the hair is not strictly pointing down along the back and towards the ground. It also supports various built-in "presets" that can be used to implement certain poses instantly (like gravity specific hair pull), and the final result can always be tweaked in the viewport if the posing isn't totally optimal.

Above and beyond that, the underlying tech (which is actually a bunch of stuff I recycled from some plugins I'd previously written) also implements rudimentary hair sliding *without* running an iterative physics simulation first. This means that the hair will attempt to maintain the overall guide lengths whenever possible, allowing the ends of the hair to extend downwards or retreat upwards as the head moves around. If the rig is operating in a mode where the hair is bound to the shoulders or back, then this will result in the visual appearance of the hair automatically sliding up and over those surfaces.

All in all, as far as C4D is concerned- I think this is the best that I can hope to accomplish at the moment. Some parts of the rig will probably require tweaking in the future as I start to use it, but fortunately the majority of it was designed to be as modular as possible specifically so that the rig could be improved over time without affecting any existing scenes or the style customization contained within those scenes.

Some stupid statistics of what was required to make this work because why not: