Best simulation method to use for long ears?

[Zybrand]

Hi Guys, this my first post on the community and hopefully the first of many.

I need some advise with a character I am working on for a local t.v commercial. It's a basset type dog that is already animated and has a envelope and the name tag is simulated with rigid bodies. Only the ears are not animated or simulated yet, and I would like to try and simulate the ears with cloth of a soft body effect or Lagoa rather than animate it.

I have never done a simulation on a character rigged character with fur as well before and I am pushing my luck here because I am working to a deadline. So I hope to save some time in the expectational phase and hopefully some one who knows more about these types of simulation can point me in the right direction.

ps: ignore the lighting and environment thats not the render scene

[Helli]

I would say try syflex.
It is not a really good solution for large scale productions I guess but if we are only talking about some short shots it should be okey.

Ideally I would add such simulation features directly in the rig (you would have some dort of geometry simulated with syflex or lets say momentum 2 ropes or whatever and then you evnelope the real ears) like:

Split the ears and the body and use the pin option to pin the ears to the body where the body (or part of it like only the head) would be the collision object. Then you could constraint nulls to all points of the ears and envelope the original ears to those nulls.

I am quite sure there are better solutions but this one should be fast and reliable.

[Zybrand]

Thanks for the advise Helli

in the end I decided to stop being lazy and I animated the ears with a rig.
I will try out what you said about syflex I'm still interested to see what results I can get with it.

[EricTRocks]

If you can wait for the new Softimage 2012 the ICE integration for Syflex is awesome and very easy to use. Also Momentum 2 might be a good alternative as well to simulate the ears.

[Zybrand]

Thanks for the heads up Eric! ICE integration for Syflex is great news. I have been using ICE for a while now and I would be a lot more comfortable with using Syflex in a ICE workflow than the current Syflex setup because I know Ice better. I have seen some videos on Momentum 2 as well and it looks like a very powerful plugin.

This project is finished now, you can see a cature here http://www.vimeo.com/21015847 it was all animated using GEAR including the ears. I have a new project in with I have some object which I want to do some cloth simulation though so I will definitely give ICE integrated Syflex a go.