A suite of Houdini nodes for hair and fur pipelines, designed to integrate cleanly into a production environment without displacing the tools and workflows already in place. None of the nodes require the others to function. Each one does its job independently and works alongside whatever else an artist already has in their scene. You can adopt a single node for a specific problem, build a full pipeline around the suite, or anything in between.
Getting started #
If you’re new to the suite, a typical starting point is Hair Prepare, which conditions incoming curves and computes the attributes that downstream nodes expect. From there the workflow depends on what you’re working on. The documentation for each node covers how it connects to the others.
See the example scene for a demonstration of the tools themselves.
Deformation Workflow #
The general workflow for working with this curve deformation system is:
- Load a dense groom. This may or may not come from Houdini.
- Use the hair_prepare node to transfer necessary skin attachment attributes to each primitive.
- Use hair_select or hair_extract_clumps to select simulation guides from the set of dense curves, or import existing guides and use hair_prepare to similarly prepare the guides for mesh attachment.
- Simulate or otherwise deform the guides (a procedural application of hair_collision may be sufficient).
- Use hair_deform to associate guides with each curve of the dense set and deform them to the animated guides.
- Use hair_collision to push any guided curves out of the collision shapes in a post sim operation, if necessary.
- Profit.