Fur in Crowd

[afandina]

Hi everybody, I just want to know if its possible to make crowds with furry agents like dogs or Cats??

and should the fur be simulated with the agent (FBX) before crowd sim or it should be done inside the crowd sim??

any ideas about using fur in crowds ??

- another question please .. in this amazing reel by David Vestin he mentioned that he used Fur(VDB) with volume shader..

can anyone help me how to do this as it may be used as an alternative way to do fur in crowds...

 

Regards..

[edward]

Currently, the crowds in Houdini 15.5 only support skin deformations. For short fur, it's probably doable by first grooming the fur on your character and then skinning them along with the skin geometry. If you really want simulated fur, then you would need to somehow convert the simulated fur into bone skinned geometry first. The alternative is to do it after the crowd sim but then you'll need to unpack the agents which can be really heavy.

[afandina]

thanks edward , I tried the way you told me, I created the hair in the main FBX character, I don't need simulation as its very short hair , I just need it to follow the skin deformation. So .. every thing is OK. until I baked the agent, it ignored the fur, and gives me some curves (not Fur.. it may be the fur guide curves).. that are not following the animated agent after baking...

see the attached images...

any ideas to help me to fix this issue?

thanks a lot

[edward]

I think the default Fur set up doesn't use skinning but rather moves the curves according to the underlying skin geometry. Once you've created the geometry, I would merge it with your skin geometry and make sure it has capture weights. Hide/undisplay the other fur objects.