Finally, finally finally, I found the solution to animating the pearl diver's hair, & it's called N-Cloth. Surprisingly, N-Cloth has hidden features as well, and that is the ability to animate rigid objects such as glass.
The whole process of animating the hair starts in Daz Studio. I used mocap (motion capture) data to animate the diver then chose a hair prop that was long enough so it touched her shoulders.
Now the magic begins. I imported the file in Maya then applied the N-Cloth to the hair prop. I slowed down the animation a bit using the trax editor, so the N-Cloth could be calculated better. I also chose an N-Cloth preset, (denim), which had the best result in the simulation. N-Cloth is surprisingly flexible because it can also animate cloth tears & rigid objects like a glass shatter. To better showcase the scene , I applied a turntable animation using the method taught by Alex Alvarez. Later I added water fx & a volume light to the scene.
Now it's time for Afterfx to put the pieces together. I created a jelly fx to simulate a bubble dancing around to further push the theme of the pearl diver. Later I used an expression to loop the animation then masked out unnecessary areas, and voila, it's done.
3D model
concept
