Flowing Hair

#1 Myself- I would look into ropes, or simulating chains, or something like that, and then figure out how to migrate that to maybe a spline and then turn that into hair. It's kludgy though, I think, but it's a hard problem. There should be some stuff about it on the net for googling, though probably not Torque related.

#2 Rope simulation makes good sense. I'm new TGB, still getting a sense of what's possible. Are there built in vertices and springs? Or would I need to just fake it with groups of objects?

If you were to write the system, where would you start?

#3 why not just animate it?

As in make sure you have say a 12 cell animation for her jumping/running what have you. Make sure the hair is adjusted correctly throughout the sequence. It would eliminate any extra work with coding or dealing with particles.

#4 That's not really going to work. The concept is to create hair that's really long, and have it flow like a ribbon dancer's ribbon:


So an example of when this wouldn't be feasible to animate is when the character is running left (the hair flowing behind), then makes a sudden turn right. The hair continues on its previous path, and the player actually passes the far tip going the other direction, before that tip has a chance to turn around and follow the roots.

I thought about all the scenarios in which prerendering animations for hair like this would be monumental, and I decided that a simulation would work best aesthetically.

Now I just need to know where to start. Good ol' TGB documentation... sigh.

#5 You should look into the existing Box2d TGB integration and see if you could build on that to have chains, that should get you what you're looking for.

#6 Yeah, probably. It's a pretty big undertaking just get to hair though, lol!

I'd have to buy the source license of the TGB also. I am willing to do it if I have to, but boy it would be swell if I could get some basic primitives going.