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Fur

Make fur move using dynamics

Using Dynamics, you can make fur move in either of the following ways:

• Add forces (for example, wind and gravity) to the scene and connect them to the hair system, or use the hair system's built-in forces. See the Hair and Dynamic Curves guide.
• Animate the movement of the surface and the attractors will react appropriately.

To make fur move using dynamics, the attractors you use must be dynamic hairs. For more information about dynamics, see the Dynamics guide.

Example of an animal shaking

The following example illustrates how you can make fur react to the motion of the object it’s attached to. For example, when an animal shakes its body, its fur reacts to the motion. For simplicity, we’ve used a cylinder to represent the body of the animal.

To play the animation, click the link below.

shakingAnimal.mov

To make fur react to motion

1. Make a cylinder and add lights to your scene.

2. Add fur to the cylinder and then apply the Fur Preset LionMane.
3. Select Fur > Offset Fur Direction by > 90 degrees.
4. Add a 3 by 6 grid of hairs. (See Create a hair system to be used with fur. Make sure you select dynamic as your hair curve type.)

5. Attach the hair system to the fur. See Attach and detach hair systems to/from fur.
6. Select Fur > Set Start Position To and select the fur description so you don’t lose the combed or inclined position of the fur.
7. Keyframe the movement of the cylinder as follows:
• Turn on Auto Key by clicking at the bottom-right corner of the Maya main window.
• Move to the first frame and select Animate > Set Key.
• In the Channel Box select the Rotate X, Rotate Y, and Rotate Z fields.
• Right-click one of the selected fields and select Key Selected.
• Move to another frame and change the Rotate values.
• Repeat the previous step as required.
8. Edit the attractor set (in the Rendering menu set select Fur > Edit Curve Attractor Set > AttractorSetName). We changed the following attributes:

Attractor Model = Local
Curves per Fur = 1
Radius = 10
Influence = 1
End Length = 5
Threshold Length = 0.33

9. In the hairSystem, set the Start Curve Attract attribute to 0.2.
10. Click the Play Forward button to check that the attractors are moving the way you want the fur to move.
11. Fine-tune the movement of the attractors, if necessary.
12. Render the frames that make up the animation. For details, see Render an animation with fur.