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kristinka hair for Houdini


amm

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Hello,

I'd feel free to offer the Houdini version of Kristinka Hair. It is a hair styling system, created with Sofimage ICE. Generally it combines the external geometry used to get the main shape, together with sequence of procedural modifiers for details. It started as an publicity available experiment, few months after first release of ICE at the end of 2008. It had an enormous luck to be constantly tested, commented and used by Softimage artists, to this very day. Perhaps best known use case is version od AMDs Ruby , Nose Job TV commercial as well - while Psyop people, as far as I know, created a lot of additional solutions, on top of its base structure. 2011 it is promoted by Autodesk Area people . What is available to find in this, I hope only initial Houdini release, it is a snapshot of latest version. I think some recognizable, good and bad points are:

 

1: Mentioned 'from top to bottom' approach. After initial hedgehog's hairdo, there's one or many 'form' nodes,  for shaping by external geometry, usually NurbS surfaces or curves. Next step is sequence of procedural 'modifiers'. Somewhere in 'modifier' stage, there is hair filler.
2: Only one network for all, flat context for everything. In Houdini it could be literally everything in one network - except of course an optional connection to DOP network or like. First node is polygonal emitter, last node is Subdivide SOP for rendering.
3: Direct rendering, shader is applied directly on hair object.
4: Each node tries to create an immediate, visually recognizable effect on final result - or at least, it tries to avoid things like initializers or so.
5: It is focused on human hair, or exactly, what some humans have on top of head. Nothing else, for now.
6. It's not generic, because of very specific structure, dependent of internally created attributes - generally it's not supposed to work with imported curves from zBrush, or anything like this.  It will work only partially with Houdini Fur SOP - while I think there is no sense to go with this.
7: Working version is created exclusively from factory nodes. Has no scripted super structure, has no underlying dlls. This is to make it easier to manage, to make it available for changes by wider range of authors. Finally and most important, should be independent of Houdini version as well.
8: It has own hair filler, based on predefined attributes and specific structure of guides (filler does not rely on spatial query or other expensive method).
9: It heavily rely on NURBS surfaces, so, basic knowledge about NURBS is really a good idea - NURBS parametrization and so on.

 

 

kristinka_h_20dec2015.jpg

 

 

This initial release is free. I made it with Houdini Indie. There are few HIPlc samples and HDAlc nodes in download, one is setup for DOP network connection. For now, I added a bunch of comments in each sample, that's all about docs. However I'd believe this should be enough to see, what to do next.

Get it there.

Thanks for reading !

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Thank You guys.

 

This is amazing. Cant wait to try it out. My method is literally making tons of guide curves. 

 

I will be happy to test this out. 

 

Just need to say, that main design of this stuff belongs to 2009 - 2011, when it wasn't really clear how  typical 'hair enveloper' should like. Today I'll go with something like Maya GMH2, as it looks like much more compact and simpler solution, also a better candidate to hold a 'long hair scene' in Houdini word.

Personally I'll stay with subject of this thread, anyway I'm pretty sure there are a lot of talented people around, perfectly able to create something like gmh thing.

I think the ground for hair rendering is already there. Things like subdivide SOP that works with curves in H 15, really nice evaluation of thousands (polygonal) curves . Also for pic above, been able to reduce Mantra render time for about ten times, by using VDB volume for all secondary rays - not any renderer can do that.

Edited by amm
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