Electric anime hair

Maxon’s Hair is Cinema 4D’s first fully integrated module dedicated to creating ultra-realistic long, flowing hair, animal fur, feathers and even grass. It’s powerful, it’s versatile, the interface is a breeze to use, and the results look uniformly excellent. But because this issue is focusing on ‘all things Japanese’, we thought we’d see how easy it would be to use Hair to animate something a little more stylised: anime hair.

In recent years, anime has become increasingly more CG-driven, with groundbreaking films such as Appleseed, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence showing just how well the old and the new can be integrated to create stunning visuals.

Initially, hair in such projects tended to be poly- or spline-modelled rather than made from individual strands, since the classic ‘clumped and spiky’ look is well suited to this particular genre. However, in more ‘realistic’ films like Final Fantasy VII, that clumped and spiky look appears to have been generated with more accurate hair simulation, for an appearance that, although still stylised, is semi-realistic.

With this in mind, we put the Hair module to work to see if it was possible to generate the same look, and then to create a short animated clip in the style of bleeding-edge anime, with the hair flowing and jittering in a gusty breeze.

Full-sized screenshots, scene files and test animations can be found in the support files, along with stock anime content provided by DAZ Productions, while the final animation itself is available for download on the 3D World website. If you plan to start from the DAZ characters, rather than loading in the scene file in the support files, you’ll also need the demo of Robert Templeton’s interPoser Pro plug-in to enable you to load the Poser content into Cinema 4D: you can find it at http://tinyurl.com/y5auyp

Click here to download the support files (~86MB)