Vanessa New Hair Rig - 1/4
Added 2020-05-01 02:38:11 +0000 UTCSo I said I was going to post some WIP stuff of this, and I think I'm finally done blowing off my own feet with "things I think will work but actually won't".
In any case, this is a screenshot of the new hair rig that I'm working on for Vanessa ATM. It took a while to figure out the general technique (especially considering how quirky C4D is with workflows like this), but so far the setup seems to be pretty stable and essentially does exactly what I want.
I kinda wanna keep this short since I have a feeling a lot of people just gloss over some of my longer technical posts, but in essence this is a new system for mapping long hair styles onto existing rigs (so they can deform along with that rig as it moves around) while still allowing the hair style to be fully tweaked in real time.
Most of the magic comes from the fact that the control handles (which are the blue spheres in the viewport) essentially exist within "pose space" (rather than world space), so they can track around with the underlying rig while simultaneously being able to modify the resulting hair style. This allows the existing character pose to define 95% of the hair style, however that remaining 5% can still be dialed in after the fact to get a nice flowing style (which is something that the computer can't really solve automatically without excessive complexity).
Anyways, I've still got some work to do on this (mainly tidying up some of the core logic and moving some of the more complicated things into a custom plugin), but I don't think that won't take too long to do. The moment this is done I'll be moving onto the FwF image sequence, so hopefully this rig will reduce the amount of time I'm spending on any given frame and things move reasonably quickly for that project.
