Fusing multiple primitives into one without altering geo

[enayus]

I have a project in which I've modeled a spiderweb using this tutorial, and am now at a place that I'd like to introduce dynamics via the wire solver. However the issue I'm having is that the tutorial creates the spiderweb geo in such a way that every radial and outward strand of the web is a separate primitive, and when I pin the edges and pipe it into a wire solver, the whole thing falls apart, disconnected. .HIP of just the geo is attached.

 

Here's a list of things that I've tried without success:

-Fuse SOP and Join SOP (Join SOP adds strands to connect various chunks of strand to each other)

-Scatter and a Point Wrangle via this entagma tutorial

-Various snippets of Python posted by other users having similar issues but quite duplicate issues

 

I've heard that point clouds could be useful here, but I am pretty fresh to Houdini still and haven't invested the time for that particular rabbit hole. Would love to see if y'all have any ideas.

 

spiderwebRnD_v003.hip

[mestela]

Cool web!

I put down a clean sop which usually is able to tidy up non manifold geo like this; the fuse was correct, but there was lots of doubled up edges which the clean removed.

Re sim, I've used a grain setup, works pretty well. I've labelled most of the things, but let me know if any of it doesn't make sense. The main thing that threw it for a while was the scale, grain was behaving very strangely until I looked at the preferred grain scale size (around 0.1 for each grain), and they were all overlapping and confused. I scaled the entire web up 10x, twiddled some other numbers, much happier.

spiderwebRnD_grain_sim.hip

[enayus]

That did the trick! Thank you mestela!

 

It's interesting how the density of points from resampling affects the grain solver. I had to turn mine down significantly to get working... Will spend some more time poking and prodding.

 

Here's an art directed project if anyone's curious.

shot050_1021_v1.hip