abvfx

This is cool to know, joined!

I feel like an idiot, worked perfectly cheers mate

Hi there, I'm not a very competent python user. I can read it but im at the stage where i can create it. I am looking to build a shelf button that will import a specific file on disk into my scene using a single button. The location of this file will not change. This seems like a simple series of commands but im lost as to how to do it. Any help my hoodniks.

From the grooming toolset there are many things i would like to see changed or added. Hair Generate SOP - This sop in my opinion is not very efficient because one, its a HDA. And most of the grooms i work on easily can reach in the millions. A pure rewrite of this node to be able to deal millions of primitives would be ideal. Two, it is doing two jobs instead of one. Its main focus should be to generate primitives and give them controls to interpolate them. Which it does have... but it also deals with distribution. This makes the process cumbersome when layering maps. Say you have a general density map for the face, you like the way everything is.... but you realize you need more density in the nose. How would you add it without changing the general seed of everything. You can make another hair generate just for the nose and merge them... this is inefficient. I made a HDA where you essentially can merge scatter nodes together (one for the face, one for the nose), that will be your density, run them through a single interpolate and you have your hair. Only once will you need to generate primitives. hairClump SOP - This node crashes a lot. I have a tutorial on my site that shows users how to control the profile of the clump in different areas without needing multiple clump nodes with different profiles and blending them together. This process when scaled up causes crashes. It utilizes Guide attributes on the tightness parameter. Also this is another node i believe needs to re-written from the ground up. When working with grooms, it is also extremely slow to process and i have a pretty decent machine. guideProcess SOP - Frizz Mode - in other packages known as scraggle or noise, is pretty much unusable. It produces very repetitive patterns and takes a lot of work to breakup. Extremely low values are need to get anything that looks like natural and even then the effect has to be toned down a lot. guideProcess SOP - Displacement Mode - When dealing with grooms in the millions, the guide process node is another HDA, which means its gonna be slower than something that has been optimized. If you are displacing large grooms it would be ideal to do so in an effcient way because that kind of processing can be expensive. guideMask SOP - This node is very usefull, but again suffers from the problem of efficiency. It is always going to be dealing with millions of primitives and so optimizing is something that would be greatly requested by myself and other artists. attributePaint SOP - Options for inverting, or copying maps would be very useful. ViewPort - I can get specular in the viewport only sometimes at work. (when i open a file, but once i start editing then it breaks). All the time when im at home. Not sure what the cause of this is, but even with the specular still isnt as good as Xgen display. shotSculpting hair - I have seen various solutions in the process of shot sculpting hair, i would love to have a proper system on achieving this. ___________________________ I will be submitting these to the official RFE directly to support

If you have your guide groom sop selected, hit whatever your hotkey to go into selection mode (i have mine remapped because im left-handed), then have the radial menu setup to have screen brush. And you will groom on the guide select. https://abvfx.me/portfolio/guide-width/ If you jump to the 3:20 mark you will see i use the radial menus to plant and then select the screen brush to sculpt. Groombear is not required for this functionality.

Hey guys, I'm basically using the guideGroom sop inside of a regular Geometry object. But if i use the radial menus or shelf to switch to screen brush or plant guides it pops me out of SOPs and now im at OBJ level and puts me into select mode. It works just fine if i use a Guide OBJ but I want to do this inside a regular Geometry OBJ. What would i need to add to the shelf scripts to do this? I took a look at the furtoolutils def startGrooming(kwargs, tool=None): active_pane = toolutils.activePane(kwargs) if isinstance(active_pane, hou.SceneViewer): groomobject = getGroomObject( active_pane, 'Select an object to groom and press Enter to complete.', acceptlegacyfurobject=True) Not sure how to edit this so that it will accept regualr OBJ nodes. The workflow i currently use is with the guide groom node active, hit select, grab a couple curves, then radial menu what brush i want.... but if this is done in an OBJ node, it pops me out wanting me to select a groom object. Im trying to not use a Guide Groom node, because its quite heavy there is an extra subnet full of unnecessary calculations. cheers Andrew

I'm not leaving anytime soon. It was 2002 when I found this place, I was a lurker for a few years before making and account and saying a word. I think it was the Apprentice edition combined with 3DBuzz free training + 3D World magazine that got me here. Such an exciting feeling i had knowing absolutely nothing. Nowadays, i now know what i don't know...... which is still a lot! But I use Houdini everyday for work while many of my colleagues are still forced to use Maya, and I think this place is partly responsible for that in creating a truly creative community that embraces the sharing of knowledge, one that has never devolved into petty drama (which often happens with old school forums etc). Thanks Marc for making this place, i dont think i would have a career using Houdini if i didnt have help from the amazing people here. SESI have their official forums (as they should), but this is THE Houdini community for me and many others. Here's to another 20 years.

The grooming workflow from H16 and up is now SOP based and not a rendertime procedural by default. If you want to sculpt on the final hairs that will be rendered you can, its just not that fast.

Yea i am weary of any investment into SESI or any company that i enjoy using their products. This arrangement though looks like a more symbiotic relationship. Neither party is dependant on each other and it isn't based off sales. I think it is going to be a great partnership. First things first.... nice exporter for Houdini hair into Unreal. They bought out Shave and a Haircut to get rid of that stupid patent by Joe Alter so they could invest in yeti but yeti is no match for Houdini's grooming tools... among loads of other things.

I still was unable to get decent randomisation and i wasnt the only one. Another groomer had the same problem, so he made a tool to replace it.

I imagine what you need is Guide Skin Attribute Lookup Sop. First input is the guides/hair and second is the Skin you want to inherit UV's.

Did you get anywhere with this? This is a very interesting subject.

So one thing ive realised that make things look a little "same-y". Is the frequency random is fine, but its applied all over. Is there a way to keep the frequency but adjust the seed per primitive? I tried using the @id but it doesnt work.

Also it might behaviour as expected but that means i wont be able to get a different seed of the same frequency per id right? Random freq will give me a different hmm, weird. Every time i turned the Rand Freq up it did it all as one. Thinking about it, I have has this happen before with guide mask random tab where it will treat them all as one. Cheers for the example Tomas. I'm gonna take a look now.

Thanks @Sepu im gonna try this right now. edit:// yea so i tried this. I couldn't put it in the amplitude because that will just increase/decrease the effect, i need a random seed on the frequency or just even a random frequency for the prim. When i put it on the Frequency Guide Attr i get random behaviour. But when i switch it from two to continuous/discrete and other distribution is i get a much more random effect. So this work. I was thinking is there a more elegant way to do this. I don't think so. This is exactly what i need. Perfect Cheers