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fur workflow on houdini


SciMunk

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Hi All,

 

I had some question about the fur workflow on houdini, I'm used to work grooming on maya with tool such as xgen, yeti, ornatrix, and I wish to start using houdini as my main grooming tool as it offer far more liberty, I however have some trouble understand how to efficiently use all the tool availlable, if some more experimented artist could lead me in the right direction, that would be really helpfull !

 

first thing I noticed is that it is not possible to paint texture on houdini, at least not the same way you can on maya. on xgen, you control everything by using expression and map, where you can paint mask onto the mesh to control more accurately the effect of modifer (noise, clump, etc), on houdini, you can only paint on the mesh data, that where I'm unsure of what to do; painting on an external app would make the whole process way too difficult to be viable, subdividing the mesh to get the accuracy of a 4k/8k texture would probably be impossible for the computer to handle. I'm sure I have to think the whole thing differently from the usual texture based workflow, so what would be the best way for that ?

 

the other thing I noticed is houdini is really much slower at generating the resulting fur than any tool on maya : xgen,yeti or Ornatrix can all generation millions of strand and display them in just than a few second, where houdini need way more cooking time for far lower strand amount, this can really become a bottleneck when doing lot of small change. but maybe I'm doing something wrong ? it would be clearly impossible to groom an entire lion if at each minor change, the artist need to wait 1 whole minute to see his change on the viewport. What are the trick used in these situation ?

the kind of grooming I seek is for character that can have about 2 to 10 million strand of fur, which is normally not a problem to work on maya, but houdini is terribly slow when approaching the 500k/1Million strand.

 

one last question is about character scale, maya have a workflow in cm, so if I create a character that is 75cm tall and import it on houdini, it become 75meter tall, now if I want to groom this character, should I keep the current scale as is, and then reduce the uniform scale of the entire asset if needed ? or should I scale the mesh down to 0.01 and work from there ? I noticed that scaling down prior to start the grooming, I get huge density value for the guide/fur like 47000, and voxel scale being very small, should I consider working on the unchanged scale instead ?

 

Thanks in advance for any futur advise!

 

Edit: added another question

Edited by SciMunk
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