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Pixar in a Box
Course: Pixar in a Box > Unit 4
Lesson 1: Hair simulation 101Stiffness and damping
Springs connected in strands create bouncy hair simulations. To make it more realistic, we add dampers to resist fast changes and settle hair quickly. Balancing spring stiffness and damping achieves the desired artistic look. Experiment with these settings for realistic hair behavior.
Want to join the conversation?
- Sorry for disturbing but I don't understand(6 votes)
- Well in basic terms here is what she is explaining. Merida's hair takes a long time to settle after a movement. To change this she introduced these tools: stiffness and damping. Stiffness makes the hair stop faster and a damper is a thing that resists fast changes. These tools working together makes Merida's hair stop more realistically. I hope this helped you understand. :)(26 votes)
- How much damping did it take for Merida's hair?(11 votes)
- i realized that if you straighten out a spring, it is a straight line.(5 votes)
- hey hey but what about straight hair..? Does these kind of simulation we went over so far also count in straight hairs?(5 votes)
- yes. Slightly different probably, but likely yes(1 vote)
- hey can you do this with other types of hair like luigis hairstyle(4 votes)
- stiffening or damping a spring is basically just filling a shock (for example a car shock) or spring with oil, if you have an RC car without oil filled shocks and you drop it, it will bounce but if you have an RC car with oil filled shocks and you drop it, it will not bounce but the shock from you dropping it will still be absorbed(3 votes)
- Is it possible to see the code for adding the damping?(3 votes)
- How could you use stiffness and damping?(2 votes)
- Does anyone know how to make a 3D semulation(2 votes)
Video transcript
(metal clattering) - Now that you are comfortable with how springs expand and contract, we can try something a
little bit different. Let's try connecting a bunch
of springs together like this. When we simulate springs, we don't draw them using
the zigzag pattern. Instead we use lines, which can expand and contract. This gives us a really
bouncy strand of hair, but it's a bit too bouncy. Notice the hairs take a really
long time to settle down. This isn't very realistic. Take a look at our reference shots again. See how quickly the hairs come to rest, just a few bounces. You might think changing the
spring stiffness will fix this, but look what happens. Both low and high stiffness values still result in hair
which never settles down. Our solution to this is adding what's called a damper to each spring. A damper is something that resists fast changes in displacement, and it's used to bring springs to rest much more quickly. Check this out. Here we have the same
strand of hair as before, except each spring is
connected to a damper, and we can change the amount of dampening using this new parameter. If we increase damping, the springs resist quick changes, and therefore come to rest much faster. However, too much damping will result in really stiff hair, which isn't natural, and here's what it looks like with a whole bunch of hair. We went through a similar exercise in the early stages of
modeling Merida's hair. We were trying to get the right mixture of spring stiffnesses and damping so that we could achieve
the desired artistic look, but with the wrong settings, the springs start fighting each other, and you get pretty funny results. So the trick is to find a nice balance between spring stiffness and damping. You can try this out in the next exercise. Here you can control
damping of each spring, number of hairs, number of springs per hair, and spring stiffness. See if you can come up with something that behaves a bit more realistically.