Thank you Jeo for taking the time to look into this. I'm sory I can not send files out. If the hair is stationary it renders when I add the point cache from the simulation is when the distance becomes an issue. This is the way we set up the simulation. Its 2 different departments that work with the hair before its final ending. We have seperate files and seperate riggs. The lighting department gets the stationary hair with the stack that is above then applys the point cache that comes from the fx department.
The fx hair set up goes like this:
We take the hair file remove all modifiers execept the Ox Guides from Shape, then add Ox Mesh from strands. This gives us geo strips in the form of the hair guides. We turn those strips into cloth and use the cloth modefier to create our simlation. We skin wrap the geo strips to the editable spline. We have an in house tool that does that for us, so every spline is wraped to one geo strip. Then we export cache of the splines out and import it back to the hair file on the lighting side.
And their stack looks like this:
- editable splines
- skin wrap (to driver)
- Ox Guides From Shape
- ground strands (to hair caps)
- skin wrap (to driver)
- point cache (cache from cloth simulation strips)
- srtand detail
- hair from guides
- strand guides
- strand length
- stradn frizz
- render settings
- mesh from strands
- vray ornatrix mod
We are not married to this set up, it just works. Its fast, predictable and eassy to manage (most of the time). I would like to find something out that eliminates the distance all together and gives better controls and connection between hair style and simulation. For example the cloth strips are great on straight hair. But if the characters hair is anyhting but straight, curly or wavy the cloth route does not work very well cause the cloth strips straighten out. They do not hold shape very well, especially if the character does fast moving actions.
