Suggestions on freeflowing hair and cloth

jchmack

19-06-2008 10:22:05

I have a model that has a ponytail and i would like to make her hair a little less static. I am trying to make her hair (and eventually her clothes) move realistically.

Right now i am thinking about just adding a couple of bones down the length of the ponytail then setting their position based on a couple of rope/pulley joints in series to simulate the hair.

But I'm not too sure about the cloth. I know that NxOgre has a cloth object but i have never messed around with it. I am mainly worried about speed. I don't need a ton of calculations happening for such a small visual effect.

Does anyone know how they simulate all these sort of soft objects? It must be pretty processor friendly because i've seen many of these features (hair/cloth/breasts) in many last gen games (tekken/soul calibur). If i am correct the ps2 had a 294 MHz processor? So it should be a pretty low cost effect.

All input is appreciated =)

xadh00m

19-06-2008 10:57:20

IMHO the most performant method would be to just animate the bones in
your preferred animation tool. If this is not realistic enough you could think of decoupling this part of the skeleton and manually control the animation states.
If this does not turn out to be realistic enoug I would recommend some PhysX with actors connected via RevoluteJoints...