The main problem I had with Soft's hair was that sometimes
the guides would pop, change shape without any apparent
reason. So I had to be really careful and keep several copies
of it.
Yes, I had that too last year. It appeared to me that it
would happen more often when undoing a hair modeling operation
and then saving the file. Upon reopening some hairs would pop
into seemingly random directions (most of the time penetrating
the surface they grow from).
It did happen frequently (like several times a day) but
Icouldn't find a way to reliably reproduce it.
Another real problem I found was that hair simulation
malfunctions (read: creates totally unpredictable and wrong
looking results, including totally stiff strands) when telling
it to collide with a subdivision level of the emitter surface.
It sort of worked having it collide with the unsubdivided base
mesh, but that would cause visible faceting of the rendered hair
due to the coarse nature of the base mesh in my particular case
(Shave doesn't seem to interpolate emitter normals on a per
render hair basis).
An alternative would have been to actually subdivide the
emitter mesh instead of using subD's, but that would've created
so many additional guide strands that the grooming process would
have become too slow. Even having the hair collide with a
subdivided copy of the emitter mesh created erratic results. In
the end I gave up and did not use dynamics at all, which was
ok-ish in my case since the hair was relatively short.
Did you encounter the same problem, and if so, how did you
solve it? It's reproducible in 2013, 2014 and 2015 btw, at least
for me.
That's one fluffy, great looking bird btw!
