Dynamic Hair Tutorial Part 1 (Setting it up for dynamic connections)

Time for dynamic hair rigging using NURBS curves and dynamic properties for them.

Start off by having a mesh (this can be done before or after the dynamic curve is done, but you need the mesh to know where to place the joints).

Simple fringe and long and short side hair strands. (Poly hair)

Make sure the pieces are broken down to pieces that you want to move/not move. Clear history and freeze transform, part of keeping the channel box clear and your RAM empty. UV the mesh now or later, it does not really matter, since again, you can clean it before you skin the mesh to the joints.

Each hair strand is a different mesh/object

Place the joints, along the curvature of the hair mesh. Orient the joints, the default settings in Maya itself should do the trick.

X-ray joints, you can see I share the joints on the 2 front hair strands.

Time to do the curves, the tool I will be using is the EP Curve Tool not the CV Curve too. any settings would work, I prefer the Curve degree to be set to a "Linear" since it will create straight lines going from one joint to another.

Default settings

As I was saying, to have the curve go from one joint to another, you need to snap ("V" key) the control points to be on the joints.

Mesh with joints (left), joints with curve (middle), curves (right).

Make sure you have renamed your mesh, joints and curves for easy outliner reading and organisation before going to the next step.

Those with "_skinned" are joints to be skinned, mesh will have a "_GEO" string, groups will have a "_GRP" string.

Remember, NO history and transforms, delete history and freeze transforms before skinning. I chose to skin the "selected joints" to the selected mesh because if I set it to "joint hierarchy" the side joints of the strands of hair are going to be influencing the side hair strands, which we do not want.
Skinning method is set to "dual quaternion" because that skinning method ensures a better deformation in the mesh when the joints move. The rest of the settings I leave them intact.

Skin time.

Now, hide all the mesh and the joints, either isolating the selection or go on the viewport menu and view only the NURBS Curves. Select all the curves and go to the "Dynamics" tab, click on "Hair" and go down the menu to click on "Make Curves Dynamic". You can assign a new hair system to another clump of hair if you want, but I put the fringe under 1 hairSystem and the side hair strands as another.

Go to the settings of the tool.

Set the "Attach curves to selected surfaces" to OFF because there is no surfaces for you to attach the curves to.

Just to check, your Outliner should look like this before you go any further:

This concludes the first part of the tutorial: set up for the dynamic curves driving the mesh  (no connections yet)

Click here for Part 2

If you have any questions, you can leave a comment or you can send an e-mail to me. Thank you for your audience.