Getting Hairy with the Hair controller

By: Anupam Das

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.

Step 2) Under Simulation, set the simulation stop time to 6 seconds.

Step 3) Click on PGROUP (under particle groups). Set the Particle Type to Strands. Turn Show Tails off. Set the number of particles to 6000.

Step 4) Add a Hair controller. Press play. Your view should look like this:

Step 5) Click on the Hair controller and change it's Pitch orientation to 90 degrees.

Step 6) Click on Position. Assign an Envelope to the X Position.

Click on the Envelope button to display the envelope editor. Select Load and load the envelope hairmove.env from the hair tutorial directory. Set the end behavior to Ping Pong.

Step 7) Play the animation. You should see the hair emitter moving back and fourth on the X Axis. You may also need to move the camera back a little to get a better view of the action.

Step 8) Add a Death Wish controller. Leave all values to default.

Step 9) Add a Drag controller. Set the Drag Coefficient to 3. We add the drag to introduce a little dampening to the hair so that it is not so springy. Play the animation. You should see some nice flowing hair.

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 10) Open the Death Wish controller. Set the death value to 2. Play the animation. Notice how the hair is not 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, -4.67m, 0, and set the Scale to 300, 300, 300.
Step 10) After pushing Play, your hair should flow nicely around the collision object, like this:

NOTE: The Red colored strand segments represent the collision contact areas.

Importing Strands into Layout

1) Click on Particle Group. Click on the File button and type "HairParticles" for the name of the effect file.

2) Right click on the particle group and select "Create Effect Object". After doing so a dialogue will pop up showing you where the Object file was saved. Keep a note of this.

3) Click on the rewind button and record the animation for a few frames. Do this by clicking on the record button, and then pressing play. Click on the record button again when you want to stop recording.

4) Exit out of Particle Storm.

5) Go to the objects panel. Click on Load Object and load HairParticles_1.lwo (which PStorm generated in step 2).

Note: The object file has a _1.lwo extension because it is possible for PStorm to create multiple .lwo files for the same strands if necessary. This will only happen if you have a large number of particles in the Particle Group.

6) Now we want to apply the Particle Storm Displacement map plug-in on top of this strand object, so select ParticleStorm from the displacement map plug-in selector.

7) In the displacement map plug-in, click on Load PSM File and load the HairParticles.psm file that was generated during recording. Upon loading, the start and end frame values should change to the start and ending frames of your recording session.

8) Toggle the Use Strands button on.

9) Exit the displacement map plug-in and exit the objects panel.

10) In layout, set the camera position to: x:33cm, y:4.2m, z:-18m. Set the camera's rotation to Heading: 0.0, Pitch: 18, Bank: 0.

11) Make a preview. You should see the strands moving around in layout.