pulsarbird

Horse Animation Test

Published: March 21st 2025, 7:16:06 pm

Well sadly this turned out to be completely unworkable. :c

I did a quick walk cycle animation with this guy so I could test the hair physics. And wow, that is just nearly impossible to get right. This particular render is pretty bad, but after days of messing around with it, I just couldn't get it to work. The tail has an excessive amount of jitter on it around the base. No matter how much friction or impulse damping I put on it, I never got close to a stable sim. Weirdly, the mane was even worse, even though it requires significantly less motion. I have physics turned off for the mane because no matter what I did, the entire thing would either explode or disappear after about 10 frames. Just completely unusable.

Additionally, the hair material takes absolute ages to render. I don't remember it taking quite that long when I did the giraffe character a few years ago. So I'm wondering if some of the changes to Cycles actually made that less efficient. Blender's hair system already isn't optimized at all, but now it seems significantly worse than it used to be.

This animation was taking nearly 5 minutes per frame, which is more than twice as much any other animation I've done. I switched to the more simple hair material to compare (which is why it changes color half way through) but that wasn't much better, at about 2 - 3 minutes per frame. So yeah, it's slow as hell.

All that to say, I need to take a completely different approach to this. I'm going to have to go back to the start and build the hair out of hair cards. Which is another thing I have to learn since I have no experience with them. I think that's the only way I'd realistically be able to manage the hair for animation. It would make simulating the hair significantly easier too since you only have to run the sim on a few polygons rather than 1000's of hair strands. I knew that going into this model the hair would be a challenge, but I didn't expect it to be this difficult. |>

There are a few other things I need to change on this model too. I'm not happy with the way the balls attach to the body, and I'm running into similar problems with the ball rig that I have with Pulsar's balls too. I think I need a solution where I can use ball objects that the scrotum shrink wraps too, in order to get proper testicle-like scrotum deformation. Otherwise, even with corrective smooth, they don't deform as orbs, but more like half inflated balloons. I think there's a similar workflow for breasts, so I might try to adapt that. Since I have to redo the hair anyway, I might as well tear down this model and fix as many fiddly mistakes as I can. Or more likely I'm going to move on to another model and come back to this one because honestly I'm kinda burned out on it.

It's frustrating that I dumped so much time into it this week, only to not even end up with something I can use. But that's just how it goes sometimes.