Shyralon 3 Posted March 19, 2020 Hello everyone! For a university project I am attempting to build a system for procedural skin pores inspired by the work weta did on Gemini Man, based on this article here and the corresponding talk I saw at Siggraph. https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/face-it-will-gemini-man/ In the article they essentially mention "growing" the pore based on previously placed curves, more or less like "grooming" the skin pores. I feel like I have a basic idea on how to approach this, but also I am quite new to Houdini so there are a couple of things which are unclear to me right now - maybe someone has some ideas on how to approach this? Mainly I am unsure about how to approach the actual connection of the pores. (here is an image taken from the article - talking about the third step) Right now I would approach it as some kind of "get closest points to current pore" while talking the flow of the curves into account, then connect them with a tubelike mesh and subtract this from the surface. But I have no idea how to actually take the flow of the guide curves into this, so I would love to hear some ideas for this. Second approach I thought about this would be to actually simulate the pores as particles moving along the surface and calculate some kind of vector field from the guides to guide them. No idea if any of this makes any sense as I am too new to Houdini to properly judge this, so I would be super grateful for any thoughts and advise on this Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Shyralon 3 Posted March 27, 2020 (edited) Also found a (rather low quality) recording of the talk I am refering to (roughly from minute 02:10 on) In this talk he states that for the connection each pore looks for the nearest point in the direction of the two nearest curve and then one beyond. So my approach right now (testing this takes time as I still struggle with vex syntax) is: get nearest point using the "nearestpoint" function, build vector from current point to each of the nearpoints. Then build direction vector from the nearest two curve points and do a dot product to check if the point matches the directionvector best, and connect these points with a curve once that is done. All in a point wrangle. After that I resample the curve, project to the surface using minpos and subtract as a VDB. Does that make sense or is there a better way? Edited March 27, 2020 by Shyralon 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abvfx 99 Posted June 5, 2020 Did you get anywhere with this? This is a very interesting subject. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Shyralon 3 Posted July 8, 2020 @abvfx Hey, sorry for the late reply, kinda forgot about this thread! yes, I did make some progress. Pretty much got it working, but there are still a couple of errors happening when I try it on more complex meshes and also it is very slow (but already know where I can optimize) 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
RTHMan 0 Posted April 27 You can ask Artur Vill. He developed the skin pores system. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
iasm6419 0 Posted May 10 (edited) I accidentally created a reply, I can't figure out how to delete it. sorry. Edited May 10 by iasm6419 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
