How would you create a pom pom?

What would be a good way to create a pom pom? As in cheerleading....

 

https://github.com/keijiro/KvantWig

 

Another option is to have the animation driven based on motion/velocity - something similar to a flex modifier in Max. Some assets on the store, kind of like jelly sprites but for 3D could provide an interesting test bed. Or spring dynamics - though that would probably be pretty expensive.
Essentially it is hair - like what bgolus linked to.

 

Yeah. I guess I could have lots of intersecting circles with pom pom textures on them and then do some sort of blend shapes on them to make them bounce a bit.

It's tricky to emulate fluffy things with polygons!

Maybe a suitable fluff shader on a sphere would look ok...

 

If it's just a few pom poms. Eg. two pom poms.
Hair Particles are one good way to make them.

But if it's many pom poms, then hair particles are a super bad idea
and your game, will immediately slow down or crash.

One good way to make pom poms, (which is difficult to explain in words) is to:
Extrude many flat planes, from an object and segment each strand, with
loopcuts. Then, add some bones to each strand and animate them.
That might be a better way, to create a pom pom.

I hope I didn't confuse you there.

 

I get what you mean. But I think bones would be overkill unless you wanted to animate each strand individually. (Maybe you might..) I think a few blend shapes of different states of the pom pom would be sufficient, there would be multiple ways to blend them together.

Unless there would be a way to make a fully physics based pom pom... IDK how that would work!

Lots of good ideas. I'll have a go at making something in Blender.

I could probably make something like this. But it would be a lot of polygons!


I'm guessing that the surface kind of moves as one (like someone said like a jelly) rather than individual movements. So that would simplify things I think to just distortions of the whole thing. My first go:

722 faces. Maybe a bit much.