Houdini 16.5 hair/fur questions

[bbentley81]

Hello,

I am diving into the hair and fur system in Houdini 16.5.  It is really amazing how intuitive the new system is. I have some questions;

1. I want to be able to change the bending stiffness along the length of the guide curve. Is there a default way to do this or will I have to unlock the "animate guides" node and add a ramp on the @kangular attribute or something to do this? I assume the u value of each curve is being generated somehow because of the color display. 

2. I did a test sim with very few guides just to test the workflow. Before I rendered the hair I did a file cache of the generated hair so it is reading from the disc and not calculating from the simulated guides. Is this the correct workflow.

3. In my render, I am seeing some of my generated hair popping back and forth. Is this because I used so few guide curves?

4. I am looking for a way to make curled guides. There is a great article in 3D world issue 218 were the artists makes an HDA that will spiral around an arbitrary curve but he doesn't go into detail about how it works.  I would love to build something like this myself but I am not sure where to start. Any pointers or resources would be awesome. 

Thank you in advance for the help.

Cheers,

Bryan Bentley