Is it possible to rig a hair groom to control how the hair moves via bones or controllers?

Development Character & Animation
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Hi there!

Is it at all possible to create a rig with a Ornatrix groom or maya scene to control a hair groom via bones or controllers or dummies? Maybe to control the guides’ extremities and how they move? Or using Physic Capsules, or using the wind? is there any way possible?

I ask for example for a character that has a ponytail, and we want to have the animator animate the ponytail in whatever fashion they want in order to convey a more powerful and custom movement for the ponytail, since animators love to animate secondary movements themselves and not let simulation do the work. The simulation, while functional, doesn’t give any room for extra dynamism or anything.

So far the only answers i have would be to use physic asset capsules to define where the simulation of the hair will block from going into via collision. And possibly use empty bones and placing capsules on those to create a movable volume to prevent the hair from going in certain places or rather preventing it from going through a specific space.
Or use wind somehow.

Thank you very much!

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I have the same problem. I need to rig an xgen Grooming within unreal and I’m not sure how to do it. In Unreal 5.4 there are new options, when importing the riggedguides option it allows me to create a chain of bones and automatically creates a mesh skeleton but I cannot do the bonding with Grooming. Please, did anyone do something similar and can help me solve it?

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If you need it animated forget physics.
Physics means random.
Animation isn’t random.

An alembic cache would probably give you some nicely authored animations.

The obvious option is not to use the groom stuff that doesnt work right anyway, and stick to god ol’ hair cards.

At that point,
The hard animation option wouls be to animate the groom verts using morphs/blend shapes.
When you combine them with a couple of bones you can get some really nice results.

Obviously, its not ever going to be a shampoo commercial, but thats just because of the engine for the most part.