applying displacement of single mesh across animated mesh cache

[motionprojects]

I have two sources, first is an animated mesh, constant topology, let's say it comes to us in a cache.

Second source is single mesh, a modified deformation of the first source at frame 1.

How could we apply that deformation across all frames of the animated cache?

As a real world example, imagine the first cache is an animated human face talking and emoting, etc.

The second source, is frame 1 of the human. In a sculpting program they have altered the ears, nose, expression, etc retaining topology. But this mesh looks like a Orc or something.

I've looked at blendshapes, ray sop, but it seems that I want to blend in pure point position + projections along normal + transform matrix to make the deformation follow the cache.

Is there some obvious solution I'm missing, or is this some vopsop magic I require?

In some workflows, people would use a displacement map if the faces were similar, but I'm looking for something more generalized and suited to more radical shape changes.

I'm attaching a hypothetical example using a torus in this file.

Thanks for any help.

Edited February 17, 2013 by motionprojects

[sanostol]

You can use the hscript command sopcreateedit to get a editSOP that contains the necessary edits to get to You reshaped model.

next You need a reference shape in the second edit input so houdini knows how to apply the shape during animation

have a look at the example

If You can store a orient (quaternion) attribute on You cache, tracking the orientation during deformation houdini can also apply deformation right (option -o)

cd /obj/pretend_torus_anim_is_cached
sopcreateedit edit1 deforming_torus reshaped
sopcreateedit -o edit2 deforming_torus reshaped
[/CODE]

blend.hipnc

Edited February 17, 2013 by sanostol

[motionprojects]

Yes indeed, this works great.

Tried it on my own to see if I could build it from scratch. Trouble at first with my orient attribute remaining at 0,0,0,0 after the sopcreateedit -o

I had missed that there needed to be a 1 in the 4th float of the orient value to start it off.

Thanks for the assistance!