I am trying to create a moving paintbrush effect using dynamic paint (in Blender 2.79). A particle system of "hair" type is the brush and a subdivided plane is the canvas. The notion is to have each brush hair/bristle paint individually, so that using collision physics the brush shape will deform as it is dragged across the canvas, and the dynamic paint will reflect that.
However I'm darned if I can get the hair particle system to paint anything! If I change the particle system to the "emitter" type it works as expected, so I think I have the basic dynamic paint setup correct. But no matter how I modify the brush settings the canvas is unmarked when the particle system is set to hair (e.g. modifying the particle effect solid radius under "Dynamic Paint Source", checking/unchecking "use particle's radius"). This is even true if the hair system is rendering objects (little bristle strand objects) rather than paths.
Maybe this is a bug, maybe it's just not implemented, maybe I'm missing some necessary setting? Would appreciate any guidance!
Note: although I have the collision / deformation working, I've turned it off while I'm trying to get the dynamic paint working.
UPDATE: well I have still had no luck with the hair particle system. The best I've been able to do is convert the hairs to curves, then to a mesh, and use cloth physics to model the deformation. Preliminarily it comes out something like I wanted, although getting the cloth physics right is a challenge.
Still: it would be much handier to do all this with the hair particle system!