Hair animation

Breakdown of timings for hair

Graph of hair motion

One of the aspects of my character that I wanted to be a big part of my animation was hair. My idea was that as my character ran his hair would trail behind him like that of a squirrels tail. In order to do this when Matt rigged my character I had him add a tail to the back of the head. I figured that making the hair flow behind the character would be a simple case of overlap, but in fact it took some intricate planning. To get the hair to cycle with the body the first joint had to follow the down of the character and then each successive joint had to follow that on a 2 frame delay of the one in front of it this also had to occur on the extreme up of the run. This was then added to a similar motion which followed the lateral movement of the character. Creating the effect you see above.