Simmer is the first Headmasters hair to feature the "Rigging" technology. What this means is as your avatar moves, the hair moves fluidly with it. You will need a Mesh capable viewer to use this properly, however with over 98% of users on SL now using Mesh capable viewers, this is a bit of a moot point.
Simmer is in store now, in all the usual Headmasters colours.
A little retrospective...
Having been working to rigging for hairs for some time now, I am pretty pleased with the results that have been coming out, however I am finding that there are some severe limitations to it as well.
A number of people in the past had previously said to me "Rigged mesh will kill traditional hair making in SL"
As with most things people have speculated with mesh, this was pretty much an incorrect statement and having worked with everything from short to long styles in testing rigged mesh, I can say with confidence that the only point where rigged mesh really comes in to its own is for the longer style that is featured on Simmer. And even then, there are some heavy limits to what you can do as the neck rotation means you get polygon buckling occurring if you "poof" out the hair alot (increase the width over the shoulder).
The second thing to consider is the detail levels you can put in, and I hate to say it, but again, they are very limited to what you can do. Trying to keep polygon costs down is almost impossible when dealing with hairs which is why Simmer has so few pieces.
While Rigged mesh is a handy new tool to use for hairs and does create some stunning work, I think I can say with all honesty, it wont be replacing traditional hair building techniques on Second Life.
