Hair and fur question

[Zigmund]

Hey guys,

Could anyone explain me why hair and fur shelftool creates two additional objects (guide groom and hair generate objects) instead of putting everything inside the original geo object? I was able to recreate everything in the original geo object, and everything works fine. Such workflow seems for me more, at least visually, obvious for me.

I have to admit that i m not big fan of shelftool, and i prefer to make everything by myself in network panel. However as i m still learning houdini, i use shelftool sometimes to understand the workflow, so i can recreate in future in the network panel from scratch.

So my question is what is the idea behind creating separate objects? Do i miss something by creating everything from scratch and putting all nodes in the original geo object, like some additional settings on the object level itself?

I could not find the answer to this question, so maybe you could shed light on this subject.

Thanks in advance

Edited November 13, 2019 by Zigmund

[kiryha]

I guess the main reasons are: structuring your network and provide some out of the box solutions. If you are more comfortable to do all the grooming in SOP it's totally fine, hairs are just curves.

You can dive inside the guide groom and hair generate objects and learn some useful techniques (until SESI rewrite them in C++) for your SOP setups.

[Zigmund]

Thanks for your reply. I thought maybe there is something special about this structure, as the documentation from sidefx, as well as some tutorials on the internet propose to use separate objects.

[kiryha]

Lucky for us, we can use whatever we need, the data is the same, it`s just personal preference on how to organize it. Take a look here for more info about using shelves workflow.

[Zigmund]

Ha! Nice. I like this blog... i didnt know he had the info on this topic. Thanks a lot!