What You DIDN'T Know About Disney's Hair: It's COMPLICATED!😵

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You can clearly see a steady improvement in animation, image quality, detail, complexity and realism. But, aside from these obvious "improvements", something that most people don't really think about, is how far Disney's hair has evolved throughout the years.
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You see, animating hair has its very own world of problems.
For example, back in the day, they used to draw directly over a live-action performance or just use the performance as a reference.
And that's all very well and good until you start drawing over the hair and realize that, drawing thousands of strands each frame is going to take a very long time.
But, not to worry, fortunately, there was a simple solution for this, which was just that; "keeping it simple".
For example, as we can see here in this clip of Snow White, the actress and Snow White herself had their hair up and fixed with a bow, this allowed the hair to be drawn as if it were one solid mass.
And this continued to be the solution right up to Little Mermaid, when computers were first used to ink and paint the animator's drawings, like, for example, here, in this Farewell Rainbow scene.
But still, Disney's hair continued to look flat and simplistic, and this still wasn't really a bad thing because the characters themselves and the world they inhabited were also flat and simplistic.
However, as technology advanced and the characters began to have more detail, hair once again became a problem, as sticking flat and simplistic hair onto a more detailed character, as you can see here, doesn't quite look right.
And so it Disney's hair needed to evolve.
Chicken Little and Bolt breathed a breath of fresh 'hair' into this evolution, but it was even more noticeable with 'Tangled'.
Now, if the average human head of hair is composed of 100,000 individual strands, and not only do these strands interact with the movements of the owner but they also interact with each other and with external elements such as gravity, humidity, static electricity, or the wind, and, as we mentioned before, if hand animating each strand of hair would be an excruciating (if not impossible) task; how in the flippin' heck did they make Rapunzel's hair the movie Tangled look so good?
Well, fortunately, with more advanced computer technology available, software engineers could now create software capable of handling such a task.
Like, for example, a hair simulation program (which they called Dynamic Wires), that allowed them to apply the laws of physics to the hair simulation
However, unfortunately, as with many solutions, these also created a new set problems.
You see, if Rapunzel's 20 meter long locks obeyed the laws of physics they would weigh over 30kg and would be dragging along the floor and pulling her back. So, in order to allow Rapunzel to move around freely whilst her locks flow beautifully behind her, the software actually had to allow animators to adjust the laws of physics too.
In addition to acting in a plausible manner, Rapunzel's hair also had to look good and be directable, so to accomplish this engineers also created iGroom. This tool let animators separate Rapunzel's 140,000 hairs into 147 different tubes, by doing this animators could sculpt the main locks of hair and therefore control the way her hair broke apart and came back together.
The next step in Disney's 'Hair'volution was in the film Brave.
Merida's hair wasn't thin and wavy like Rapunzel's, it was wild and curly. Therefore, the software engineers had to evolve their simulation tool.
After studying its behavior, they found that curly hair actually acted a lot like a spring, however, after testing, they found that stiffer springs would hold the shape of the curl but wouldn't bounce like natural hair curls and looser springs would bounce like natural curls but the shape of the curl would unwind and lose its shape, so to maintain the motion of the hair and the structure of the curl they added invisible core springs to Merida's curls to preserve their shape.
But, these new tools still wouldn't be enough for the next step up the ladder.
In Frozen, animators had to control Elsa's and Ana's plaits and braids, getting them to move convincingly and stop the separate locks from crashing into each other and doing crazy things like suddenly passing through their backs.
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