Animating hair color

[Gerry]

I've been trying to animate the color of a hair material that I'm using for pine needles. No image, just particle hair. But apparently you can't animate the color? I've been messing with this for awhile and then discovered that the settings I was changing in the pws weren't under the "actions" but were the settings for the instance. So I think I should change to an image that I can then animate like an animated decal. But does anyone know if particle hair color can change over time?

[John Bigboote]

I can look into that... seems you would do it in the chor... unfurl the 'show more than' triangle and dig for the property that you want to control...

[Gerry]

Yep, I did that. What I found was that I could drill down into the Hair System and the Hair Emitter under Groups, but not under Actions (under Actions, I can see these, but can't access surface settings or anything). It seems that I can set (or change) color settings under Groups but not under Actions, but it doesn't set keyframes, and the timeline changes from frames to percentage.

 

Right now I'm trying out an animated image (QT movie) and setting keyframes, but that doesn't seem to be working either. Very frustrating.

[John Bigboote]

I think I got it to work...(testing now) using the method I stated above. TRICK IS, you need to set the hairs color in the material emitter to 'not set', and then you can keyframe it's color changing in the choreography. Will post a test and prj shortly.

[robcat2075]

I'm trying it but not getting it.

 

Do you need just one color change? Render the frames for both colors and dissolve from one to the other.

[Gerry]

Sorry if this isn't clear, but it's getting mighty confusing! Here's a test I rendered overnight, every 10th frame so it goes pretty quick. It's the fir branches at the bottom, I want to change the needles from grey to green. The hair material didn't work, so I'm trying an animated decal of a pine needle going from grey to green and it wants to stay green no matter what I do.

 

I think I've already tried what Matt's suggesting, but I'll wait to see his test. This should be a lot easier than it is!

 

I tried it in v16 as well, but it's not working there either.

Wholething_10frameintervals_h264.mov

[robcat2075]

Here's a hair color change using the patch color:

 

Changing_Hair_Color.mov

 

HairChange02.prj

[John Bigboote]

Here we go... in this test I am animating and displaying several advanced features of A:M Hair... including dynamics, collision-detection, muhair shaders, animated length, color, and thickness...

 

This test has 1 pass for speed- will set-up a beauty render overnite... I need to go vote now.

 

 

EDIT: Ah- I see what I have done here... I actually just changed the color of the BALL- which for some reason changed the hair too... don't know why. Should help for your need though--- I'll keep experimenting over here.

HairBall_PRJ.prj

hairball.mov

[Gerry]

You guys are both great for looking into this! I'm thinking that I set too many initial settings in the material itself and it confused the program. Or me.

 

Ideally I'd like the branch to go from grey to brown and the needles from grey to green. It seems like I should be able to set the two colors independent from each other though. But if I have to have one mesh for the branch and a duplicate for the hair emitter that would work.

[mtpeak2]

Ok, heres the deal, you can't animate the hair color in the emitter because you can change the color along the length. Anything that can be change along the length can not be animated. Also, you can't animate the color using decals that control color.

 

If you need the emitter to be a different color than the hair, you can use a decal/patch image on the emitter and use the group color to control the hair color. Make sure the hair color is not set in the hair material as Robert said.

[Gerry]

Thanks Mark, that makes a lot of sense. When I would go to change the color in the emitter, I had a completely separate problem where the bottom, oh, 1/4 of the particle hair was white, couldn't figure that out and when I tried to take a screenshot to post here, the particle hair would "smear" across the frame. So I couldn't even get a screenshot to try to diagnose!

 

But obviously the percentage I was seeing in place of the timeline was percentage of the length of the hairs. I vaguely remember there being a setting for that but as I said I was in over my hair, er, head.