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Squishy, bouncy, pully, inflate.


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Hi. I am new to Houdini. Going through the tutorials still early days for me.

I have a question I am hoping someone could answer. Or maybe point me in a direction that would be more applicable to Houdini.

I am a maya user. My first love is ncloth. I have done tons of garment sims. But the thing that I am required to set up the most are ..... boobs. I have a real question. I am not trolling.

Using ncloth I have managed to setup a rather robust system that would allow me to help rig a character to deal with most situation. Interaction with a dummy rib cage. Attachment to the shoulder using a dummy muscle. Internal pressure to help maintain volume when dealing with external interaction. Like the character folding its arms for example. Plus several other things. It looks great.

Since the world is now moving to Houdini. I am attempting to learn the type of tools that I need in order to recreate a similar setup. Sadly I am very disappointed with Houdini`s cloth solver. I know that my choice of subject matter does seem a little crude. I am sorry about that. But this example is deals with every aspect that I need help with. I need to setup a simulation that can deal with the following.

Squish. Having a bend like interaction with things like cloths/ribs. But to always want to revert back to original pose.

Bouncy. Being able to give the illusion of weight. So secondary movement can be achived. This internal mass must be able to distribute its weight depending on changing body angles and interactions.

Pully. To be able to setup a "muscle" link to things like shoulders. So shape will change according to arm movements and direction.

Inflaty. The idea that if one pushes down on one end then the other end will inflate. Kind of like a balloon. Needed for things like folding arms.

I have been playing around with Houdini`s cloth the entire day and I am most disappointed with the amount of options it has. Maybe there are more options in nodes that are not applied by default? The help file in this case is not very helpful.

Any help would be wonderful. Links to cloth tuts. Maybe an idea on a entirely different direction that would help me to get a effective result.

Thanks in advance. :)

Edited by revelationsr
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For some of the deformations you should think about doing them in SOPS, with a magnet sop and metaballs to control the effect radius. Some of the dynamics you are looking to do might be better done with CHOPS, faking the dynamics, rather than going with a cloth sim. Check out some of the motion effects. You can see things like lag and jiggle. There's also a lag and jiggle shelf tool in the animation shelf you could try out. I am not a character rigger, so there are probably other options, but these are the first ideas that come to mind.

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Hang in there, the cloth is pretty ro-"bust" with Houdini 12 and Side Effects is still working on it. I believe there was a cloth training session down in LA last month, but I don't know if they have plans to put it up on the sidefx site.

If you put cloth in the topic over on this or a sidefx forum and ask a specific cloth question, one of the sidefx staff may chime in.

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Squish. Having a bend like interaction with things like cloths/ribs. But to always want to revert back to original pose.

In relation to squish, the strong bend model does just what you want, maybe a small value in combination with weak bend will get you there.

Edited by rafaelfs
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