Getting Hairy with the Hair controller

By: Tiffani Banaszak

Requirements:

Particle Storm 2.0 Pro and LightWave 5.5 or higher.
Sample Content location: Tutorials/PStorm2/Hair/

Basic Overview:

This tutorial will give you a basic overview of using the Hair emitter for making moving, reactive hair.

Scene Setup:

Step 1) Start with a clear scene in Particle Storm. Delete the Fountain controller, and add a Hair controller. Change the Strand Count to 150. This will have your emitter sending out 150 strands of "hair".
Step 2) In PGROUP, turn Show Tails Off, and change Particle Type to Strands. Push Play.
You should see the strands emitting, falling downward, and then swinging wildly around. Think of the strands not as string, but elastic string. They stretch and bounce.
Step 3) To eliminate this bounciness, add a Drag controller. Set the Drag Coefficient to 2.5. Now push Play. You will see the strands emit and fall downwards, and then stay at a fairly consistent length without bouncing around.

Changing Hair Length:

Let's experiment with different lengths of hair. The length is controlled by the amount of time we allow our emitter to grow the hair.
Step 5) Open the Affected Particle Groups menu for the Hair emitter. You will see it is turned On and set to Constant. Change it to Envelope, and open the Envelope editor.
Step 6) Create a key at frame 5 and set it's value to 0 to turn off the emitter at frame 5. Save the envelope and play the simulation.

You will now see much shorter strands emit from the sphere.
Step 7) Return to the envelope, and move the key at 5 to 10. Save and play. The strands are longer.

Having Strands Collide with Objects

If this were a head of hair, it would need to react to the person's shoulders. So let's create an object below the emitter for the strands to go around.

Step 8) Create a Collision controller.
Step 9) Set its Position at 0, -1.6, 0, and set the Scale to 150, 100, 100. The setup should look like this:

Step 10) Change the Shape Type of the Hair emitter to Ellipse Surface.
After pushing Play, your hair should flow nicely around the "shoulders", like this:

Colliding with Moving Objects:

Sometimes the strands will need to react with objects moving through them. Particle Storm hair reacts nicely to collision objects!

Step 11) Change the Scale of our collision object to 100, 100, 100.
Step 12) Create an Envelope for its X Position. (Leave Y at -1.6 and Z at 0). Set keyframes at 0 for 10 and at 40 for -10. Set the End Behavior to Ping Pong. Press OK. Play the simulation.

You will see the collision object moving through the strands. Watch until it goes through a second time around frame 60, where you will notice a very nice reaction to the collision. However, the strands appear to bend at angles where they collide, instead of flowing around the sphere.

To fix this, we need to add more segments to the strands. Think of it as adding more "joints". This will allow the strands to bend more fluidly.

Step 13) Change the Growth Rate, defaulted to 30 segments, to 100 segments. Press Play. Now you will see the hair react much more like flexible strings instead of bending at angles.

Note: The higher you make your segment count, the longer the playback can take.

Moving the Hair Emitter:

If your character moves, his hair needs to go with him. The strands in Particle Storm are completely reactive to the movement of the emitter. But remember, they do have some elasticity to them, so they could stretch as the emitter moves.

Step 14) Delete the Collision controller.
Step 15) Create an Envelope for the Z Position of the Hair emitter. Set the 0 value to 2, and create a key at 12 for -2. Make the End Behavior Ping Pong. Click Ok, then Play the simulation.

You should see the emitter sphere moving forward and back, with the hair following along nicely.