Adopt External Guides
The Adopt External Guides operator drives a dense hair groom with a small set of externally animated guides. This is much like skinning a character mesh with a skeleton: a few "bones" - here, guides - drive the motion of the whole. Instead of simulating the many guides that generated the hair, you simulate just a few external guides and let them carry the dense groom along, saving a great deal of time and effort.
How it works
You provide a sparse set of guides whose shape roughly matches the dense hair you want to animate. The operator binds the dense hair to those guides, so as the external guides move - through simulation, animation, or a cache - the dense groom follows. The closer the external guides match the form of the hair, the better the result.
Why use it
- Speed: simulating a handful of guides is far cheaper than simulating full-density hair.
- Control: you can animate or simulate the driving guides independently and predictably.
- Pipeline fit: the driving guides can come from another tool or a cache.
Workflow
- Prepare a sparse set of guides that approximate your dense groom.
- Animate or simulate those guides, or load them from a cache.
- Add Adopt External Guides so the dense hair follows them.
Related
- Moov Physics Operator - simulate the driving guides.
- Animation Cache Operator - play driving guides back from a cache.
- Hair and Guides - the guide-and-hair relationship this builds on.
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