Adorable. Imagine the detailed work of the hair movement which is on point.
Somebody put so much love into the animation of those curls.
don’t they usually animate hair like this with physics rather than actually animate it by hand?
Correct, hair is usually done using a physics simulation because to individually animate every strand (or even just every cluster) would take months or years.
CG hair actually has a pretty amazing history. If we go back to 2004, the time of The Incredibles (which notably features the long-haired character of Violet) long hair was basically impossible. The physics calculations would make it wrap against itself and stick in place or violently fly around haphazardly. The Incredibles had to engineer the technology to simulate Violet’s hair mid-production to get it to work as well as it looks in the final release (they also did great work with wet hair too).
Prior to that, the best example is 2001’s Shrek, where hair simulation had to be done wholesale for the character of Donkey and for Princess Fiona’s braid. Having the hair be short or restricted in its movement made it a lot easier to simulate, but Shrek was still very pivotal in how fabric simulation progressed (a whole other can of worms, to say the least).
Now we have movies like Monsters Inc. and How to Train Your Dragon, where not only is hair varied in style, length, and volume, but it’s all simulated with physics rather than animated in the traditional fashion. Characters like Sully or Stoic the Vast would have been utterly impossible only 10 years ago.
So yeah, it’s maybe a little bit of a let-down to find out that hair such as in these gifs isn’t hand-crafted on a frame-by-frame basis, but that doesn’t really make it any less impressive I think.
Cool commentary.
UM EXCUSE YOU YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF CG HAIR AND YOU AREN’T EVEN GOING TO MENTION BRAVE!?? Sit down son cause everything you just talked about dealt with STRAIGHT hair. Curly hair is a WHOLE new challenge when it comes to animation.
Brave was a fucking trailblazer for this shit. Pixar had to develop an entirely new physics simulator and add in new properties that were never necessary for straight-haired characters. Since each individual hair acts as a spring (and most curly hair has at least some variety in how loose or tight each curl is), Merida’s curls had to be individually adjusted in order to achieve that perfectly messy look.
And lets also point out that in order to capture the movement of the hair, they had to put it through a separate physics simulator from the rest of the animation — a simulator that had its gravity set closer to that of the moon. BECAUSE CURLY HAIR FUCKING DEFIES GRAVITY.
And do you know why this is so important? Because it opened the door for beautifully rendered natural hair. It expanded the range of hair that was available for PoC characters and is the reason that girl above has such beautifully curly hair.