Hello,
I get through all the combing, grooming, shading etc. But I must be missing something. The hair jitters a bunch when the mesh deforms (any animation). I have narrowed this behavior down to after I add child hairs and only if interpolated. Be super awesome if somebody know why this isn't working for me.
Thanks,
Wes
Hello Wes. I don't know what can be happening, but I believe the hair system has been completely changed in the latest Blender. So the issue might depend on what Blender version you are using. This tutorial is great still, it has timeless knowledge, but if you're trying to follow step by step, it may be a better idea to download the same Blender version being used in the tutorial.
Unfortunately the legacy hair dynamic solver has always been a disappointment in my experience. I received a ton of requests for adding dynamic instruction to this course but all my tests were terrible.
As Omar says, though hair dynamics is not yet implemented with geometry nodes, I believe it's going to be implemented sooner than later with 3.5 including hair growth/grooming via GN.
PS: Mad props to you for taking this elderly course! Besides dynamics, how has your experience been learning from an 11-yr-old course?
Thank you both so much. I'm pretty new at this and just assumed I was doing something wrong. It seemed like I was just missing a check box someplace. Knowing that it's just broken has saved me countless hours trying to figure out where I went wrong and can get back to being productive (finding workarounds for this issue). I went with the older methods because my understanding was the new hair nodes were not ready for dynamics yet. I figured that many had gotten the results I needed with the older methods so I went with that. Didn't occur to me that the new hair was being developed at the cost of the old. No worries. With all the time I will not now spend trouble shooting my work, I will find work arounds for my particular problem. Worst case, the thing I have has short hair all over that can be done with the new GN and the small patch of longer hair that should be blowing in the wind will work as long as I don't groom it. Thanks Kent and Omar. Yes. I learned a great deal from this course. As you say, most of the methods are still valid.
Follow up. I was ready to do the project as best I could using only the simple children (problem did show up with simple children or if I used eevee). It seemed that other people did not have this problem at all so I gave it one more go. I went back and tweaked one setting, rendered out, failed. Next setting, rendered it out, failed, and so on for collectively what felt like weeks. I was doing all the hair instructions exactly like the tutorial so it had to be something else I was doing that gave me different results. I expanded my experiments to check variation on weight paint and bone strength etc. No joy. Then, only because I had eliminated everything else, I add a subdivision surface modifier. Now it works. I had applied all mine in every test I had done thinking, less calculation, but no. Only works after subdivision. Works great now. Thanks again for the help, advice, and informative tutorials. I can't believe I'm the only person to run into this. Am I the only one that applies the sub/surf modifiers?
Probably yeah lol. Very very rarely would I apply a SubD modifier, I don't want my mesh to get so dense and out of control. It's better if in edit mode there's less vertices since making any change is much easier than when you have lots of vertices going around. Glad you solved it though. 🤙