There is so much one can talk about that is really hard to decide, I came to this course with the intention of trully learning animation and character movement but, one thing that I always admired was Hair.
Personally, I was never someone who would care much about my hair, it never looked bad and I never really did nothing unlike most girls, until teenagehood struck and my world changed and as soon as I felt good about that change and who I was, I leaned on hair. It’s weird, but it is a huge part of someone’s identity. For me it changed everything, I was a very unsure and misunderstood person, so I did what everyone always hoped I never did – I had dreadlocks made in my full head. Not as a way to go against anyone, but as a way to do something I wanted for so long and was affraid of, because of what would people think about, what would they say… As a teenager, that ussually matters, but that identity crisis made me realise that other people’s thoughts will never help me, in any way, reach my goals or even discover who I am, and what that meant to me.
So, for my research I got to a point where it made sense to try out hair and learn about it. I had an idea of a “movie of my own”, something I wrote in my college years and the main thing of that story was it’s main character and his dreadlocks. He would use them like a spider man web, but the dreadlocks would have some sort of life or will… Like an octopus. Never ever in my life I saw an animation movie character with dreadlocks and with that much importance in hair. The thing about this “movie” is that I always imagined it in a certain way, and now, more than ever I’m certain it is impossible to do an animation movie on my own. I wanted to model the character and hair, rig it, paint it, animate it, do the environments, everything! … it’s impossible, I have to be realistic and face it. So, now I face the difficulty… Where can I find a dreadlocked character to animate…? no one has one. That won’t stop me for sure.
Right now the main focus is to just talk about it, look at my options and what has been made with it. On the Pixar studios website, in the publications tab there are a few articles about hair explored in Tangled and in Moana, the hair in these movies is just more perfect than real life it’s extremelly appealing and I believe that gives so much to a character, like to a real person, hair is 50% of what you see in yourself, the rest is the face. When you check in a mirror how you look, the first thing you’ll want good is the head part, hair and face, only then you look at the rest. No one will check how they look by checking their knees first..
Also I believe, with the technology evolving so fast, hair will become something with a lot more to say. When talking about our research topic in class, Luke suggested a few tools in MAYA:
- nHair
- XGen
- shaveandahaircut
And to search about rigging vs simulating hair, as of course, if I want accurate movements in hair I will certainly have to rig it and perhaps mix that technique with simulating hair, like in Tangled where they used both to animate hair that long and good looking.