Milkey Posted August 15, 2019 Share Posted August 15, 2019 (edited) Hello all. I'm pretty new at Houdini, (about 3 weeks in), and I'm trying to figure out how to make a tool that will grow vines along a mesh, but also hold proper branching topology. I've more or less bashed some tutorials together as well as came up with some solutions of my own, but I'm properly stuck at the topo stage. Ideally, what I'm trying to achieve is extruding a box along a spline that can be subdivided to round it out similar to the topology in this image. At the moment, I'm using Find Shortest Path to generate my curves along the mesh, then Fusing and Polypath to clean up the extra points/prims. The final thing I'm doing is running my generated curves through a Polywire which has worked better for me at creating solid(ish) topo. Thanks! Edited August 16, 2019 by Milkey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milkey Posted August 19, 2019 Author Share Posted August 19, 2019 I seemingly deleted my graph on accident while editing my post, but here it is if anyone has any suggestions. Vine_PathGen_topopass.hiplc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted August 19, 2019 Share Posted August 19, 2019 Three weeks in and you're already in the deep end. This is a non trivial problem you're trying to solve. I've seen solutions come out of VFX studios, but they had multiple expert users (and math geniuses) working on it for months. What are your parameters for "proper branching topology" ? What are you trying to get that you don't already have? Certain kinds of UVs? What are you going to be doing with this geo? Projecting a texture? Baking on a 3D texture? Also your example file is based on some geo you didn't include. Please use Tommy, everyone has that geo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milkey Posted August 20, 2019 Author Share Posted August 20, 2019 18 hours ago, kleer001 said: Three weeks in and you're already in the deep end. This is a non trivial problem you're trying to solve. I've seen solutions come out of VFX studios, but they had multiple expert users (and math geniuses) working on it for months. What are your parameters for "proper branching topology" ? What are you trying to get that you don't already have? Certain kinds of UVs? What are you going to be doing with this geo? Projecting a texture? Baking on a 3D texture? Also your example file is based on some geo you didn't include. Please use Tommy, everyone has that geo. Hey Kleer, Thanks for taking the time to check this out. Yeah, I'm technically an "environment" artist for games, but the future is procedural so I figured why not take the plunge. (Plus I really enjoy near drowning in Vex.) The prerendered stuff looks amazing out of Houdini, though, and is definitely something I need to get into, like FX. Especially FX. I didn't realize Houdini doesn't store project geo locally. (Also my base model was from Maya so it was grossly overscaled.) I'm trying to create topology that is four sided, so it can be subdivided into 8 sides (or more) with clean quads. I'm controlling this at the moment through Polywire, and the topology is relatively clean, just triangulated at the joints. As for the UV's I'm not really sure how to UV in Houdini at the moment, and I hadn't really got to that stage in my learning the program yet. I was just going to do them by hand in another 3D package and use textures I have made from Substance. I planned on using this tool as a sort of a vine generator that flexes using base blend shape animations in real time. I fixed up the tool with and added Tommy as the base instead of base Unreal Guy. Vine_PathGen_topo_002.hiplc 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kleer001 Posted August 20, 2019 Share Posted August 20, 2019 Just stick the branches into the trunk and other branches. You most likely don't need it to be water tight single perfectly modeled object like it might come out of ZBrush. Don't fall into a science-experiment mentality, it's an endless rabbit hole. Just get the pixels out 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ikoon Posted August 21, 2019 Share Posted August 21, 2019 Hi Michael, welcome to the forum and to Houdini. If you like to “nearly drown” in vex, than you may like this talk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milkey Posted August 21, 2019 Author Share Posted August 21, 2019 23 hours ago, kleer001 said: Just stick the branches into the trunk and other branches. You most likely don't need it to be water tight single perfectly modeled object like it might come out of ZBrush. Don't fall into a science-experiment mentality, it's an endless rabbit hole. Just get the pixels out Yeah man I definitely feel that, I was just thinking it would be more simple of a solution than it appears to be. Thanks again for the advice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Milkey Posted August 21, 2019 Author Share Posted August 21, 2019 (edited) 15 hours ago, ikoon said: Hi Michael, welcome to the forum and to Houdini. If you like to “nearly drown” in vex, than you may like this talk Hey Jiri! I actually broke this talk down a few days ago, and spent a few days trying to construct the topo, using parts of, and even the whole tool straight up. There's definitely a bunch of strong learning opportunity there, but unfortunately couldn't get it to work properly for what I was doing. That's a me problem though because while reading vex is pretty easy to me, writing it without help is super difficult at the moment. Must be the art side of me lmao. Edited August 21, 2019 by Milkey 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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