Comb Fur

Change the direction of hairs by painting.

See also: Fur, Comb, Add Parting

Use this tool to change the direction of hairs in fur. Rarely do individual strands of hair stand straight up. Brushing them around gives the fur a more natural, scruffy look.

After adding fur with the Add Fur tool, use the Comb Fur tool and some of the paint tools to style the fur. Finally, use the Add Dynamics tool to make the fur react to the character’s motion and external forces.

Note

Before using this tool, it is useful to append a Rest SOP after your geometry node so that the fur will animate properly. In this example, you would append the Rest SOP after the Grid SOP in the original geometry object.

Combing the fur is done at the rest position. When the character animates the fur gets transformed by the way the character moves.

Using Comb Fur

  1. Click the Comb Fur tool on the Fur tab.

  2. Set the Comb Lift, Radius, UV Radius, and Opacity on the operation controls toolbar.

    Note

    You can change the Radius of your brush by holding ⇧ Shift + and dragging or by changing the value in the Operation Controls toolbar.

  3. Hold and drag your cursor over the vector attributes you want to comb.

    You can turn on the Show Guide Geometry checkbox in the Operation Controls toolbar if you want to display the guides.

For specific parameter help see the Comb node help. For general brush information see the Brush tool help.

Tips

Houdini will recook each time a brush stroke is made. To improve responsiveness while combing, reduce the Display Density on the Basic tab of the Fur Object. If this does not speed up Houdini enough, you can turn off the Display checkbox which will disable the display of hairs for improved responsiveness while you paint the geometry.

If you simply want to turn off the display of hairs for a moment when combing, you can hide other objects in the viewport by clicking in the viewer toolbar and selecting Hide Other Objects. This has the same effect on performance as turning off the Display checkbox on the fur object. Once you are done painting you can click and choose Show All Objects to display the fur again.

Once you comb the fur, you may want to use some of the paint tools to style the fur. You can paint attributes such as:density, length, clumping, base color, frizz, white hair density, guard hair density, and guard hair length.