Hey guys, so I have an attached file of an alembic file of an animated deforming creature from maya. I am converting it into a VDB volume and applying noise via vop sop. I created a rest.x rest.y rest.z volume to compute the volume noise rest fields for animation. Now the problem is, after I create these volume rest fields I need to then deform the volume rest fields to match the alembic animation so my rest field will deform along with the geometry and the noise will stick to it without any slipping

At the most basic level I can manually keyframe an xform sop, but the noise slips when there is deformation; i.e. this only works with translation or rotation

So is there any way to somehow transfer the deformation of the alembic animation over to the volume? Ideally it would be some kind of lattice deformer but it does not work with volumes. I tried transferring density to points, deforming via lattice and then transferring back, but this caused a huge loss of detail/unpredictable results. I also tried transferring volume attributes, along with a thousand other things, with no luck. Any ideas?

I posted an example file. Thanks you!

volume_deform.rar is not RAR archive
No files to extract

Ah, sorry sidefx forum duplicated my post somehow, and ended up with a blank file. I re-uploaded the scene file

What your trying to do is very difficult - good on you for attempting it.

I'm not sure if this is what your looking for or not - take a look at the attached hip file. I've used a really useful node from qlib (you can find it here: https://github.com/qLab/qLib [github.com] - I'm not sure how they would feel about me distributing it on the forum) called deform_pcloud_ql_SOP.otl (it's in the ‘otls’ folder under the ‘future’ folder).

So basically I'm transforming a scattered point cloud in the dog volume - sampling the density after applying the noise, and then transforming the scattered points using the animated point cloud and then re-creating the volume (after the animation). I'm hoping you can take this technique and from here apply some noise using a similar method or something of your own concoction to have a little bit of evolution in it.

There might be some volume masters out there who have some other techniques…

Let me know if this helps!