Hair and Children

 A while ago I announced support for strand-based hair. Over the past month there has been some important improvements. In particular, the hairs now stick to the body mesh without the introduction of a density vertex group, at least in most cases. The topic of this blog post is how the type of children affects the hair.

There are three types of children: None, which means just the hair guides themselves, simple and interpolated. The importer always creates simple children, because interpolated children during load time seem to lead to undesired results, but sometimes it can be a good idea to change the type after the mesh has been loaded into Blender.

Here is a long hairstyle. Simple children makes the hair look like a wig from the 1600s, interpolated children look much nicer.

Here is a big cat. With simple children some of the fur don't stick to the skin when posing. With interpolated children the ghost fur is gone, and the fur looks much smoother in general.

The first two examples may suggest that interpolated children are always better, but his is not the case. Here is the standard mohawk hair. Looks good with simple children, but the interpolated children are just weird.