[Maya] Help with nHair!

mechjedi

Hi,

I've been out of touch with Maya for a number of years, but have recently gotten back into using it. I've never really tried out dynamics and nhair before, but I've been looking through online video tutorials to try and understand how it works and how to use it.

I wanted to make a simple dangling rope that will swing and react to gravity, and I am able to achieve that with the nHair system for the dynamic part. The issue that I am facing is I have no clue as to how do I attach my rope polygonal mesh to the nHair curve. All my efforts right now ends up attaching the nHair to a surface as if I was making actual hair, when I want it to be the other way around, where I want my rope mesh to conform and follow the dynamics of the curve instead.

Right now, the only way I am able to do so is to extrude the dynamic curve into a NURBs cylinder to act as a workaround (which leaves it as a very simple cylinder, when the rope mesh I have made has been given a twist deformer to simulate the threads of a rope). Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. 

throttlekitty

I'm far from authority on nHair, but I think you can do that directly. Bonus tools has a 'Make Joints Dynamic' which you can use to drive a joint chain, which your rope model would be skinned to. Without bonus tools, you'd use 'make curve dynamic' on a curve, then set that as an IK Spline to drive the joint chain. I think the bonus tools script just automates these steps.