Houdini Mesh Extraction

[MatrixNAN]

Hello All,

Well recently I have been toying around with the idea of doing Mesh Extraction in Houdini and well I managed to get it to work. The added benefit of doing this modeling process in Houdini instead of say another package is the fact that you can quickly generate an entire outfit in just the matter of a few hours plus you get all the levels of detail from say division 1 to say 6. This works with nothing more than a duplicate sop coupled with a PolyExtrude SOP. The extracted mesh from the orginal surface then gains the details of the orginal mesh from the UVs which get overlayed and applied to the new object. This can then be run through a VEX SOP or a VEX Displacement shader.

Here you see the results of the displacement shader. There are no problems with the displacement shader system however there are problems with the VEX SOP. The VEX SOP requires as many of you know point values for the UVs. This is not a problem if the Unwrap of the UVs was done in a commerical package of Houdini. However if it was not and instead imported in as an OBJ from another 3D Package then this method is will not work. The imported model would then have to be re-UV assigned in Houdini and then apply the VEX SOP. This is a problem I believe that needs to be fixed.

The other problem is with the number of polygons that Houdini can handle before it runs out of ram in the Subdivide SOP. I highly recommend ISO lines for doing the subdivisions as this is what XSI uses and theirs is very fast and they can handle literally billions of polys. Mind you I have 4 gigs of ram and I can get up to around 8 million polys in both ZBrush and XSI on 1.5 gigs of ram. With Houdini with my 4 gigs of ram I could only get up too around 800,000 polys before the next division at which point Houdini crashes due to lack of ram. This is on Windows mind you and I will test this method on Linux as I know I will gain a serious ram savings in Linux but none the less this is a real problem.

Mesh Extraction In Houdini with a Displacement Shader:

Original UVs:

UVs after Point SOP Texture UVs Added:

Point SOP Tree Network:

Cheers,

Nate Nesler