MDD animation and long hair

[jim c]

I have a character mesh that is animated by a 3rd party tool (messiah) and the animation is brought into houdini via a MDD file. So I apply that to the geometry via the MDD SOP and all is well. Now if I add hair in houdini will the hair track the with the moving points and be deformed properly in DOPs? Or does that only work if you animate the mesh from within houdini? If that doesn't work is there another way to solve this?

[eetu]

I have a character mesh that is animated by a 3rd party tool (messiah) and the animation is brought into houdini via a MDD file. So I apply that to the geometry via the MDD SOP and all is well. Now if I add hair in houdini will the hair track the with the moving points and be deformed properly in DOPs? Or does that only work if you animate the mesh from within houdini? If that doesn't work is there another way to solve this?

I've done pretty much the same thing for a messiah-animated character, although it was fur instead of long hair. It worked as it should, dynamics and all. I don't remember if I had to do anything special to it, I guess not.

[jim c]

OK I'm fooling around with this now. My thought process was this:

1) take the original full character mesh, then create a group of faces to represent her scalp.

2) Make sure this has UV coords. Create a texture map that represents a length map to control the exact placement of hairs on the scalp. 3) Create a delete SOP that uses this group and branch off of the main network and delete all but the group. Access this with a node called "SCALP_OUT".

4) Create a Geo container and object import this node (SCALP_OUT) in. This is what the fur asset will use to populate the hair.

Now what I would normally do is use the DA I created that reads in the hair guides I created in modo and then this gets applied in the fur assets "guides" node.

My question is now that I have an MDD sop driving the character, *where* do I branch off the scalp node? I ask because the guides would be done in the static, pre-animation position of the character. How will Houdini know to attach them correctly?