A new way of deforming static grooms with simulated guides that is much faster and captures guides more accurately. It also has additional features to preserve the fidelity of the groom’s look. This is available in two nodes:

New Guide Reduce SOP, featuring a “spatial” guide capture mode. Guide Reduce selects a compact, representative subset of rest guides from a full set, sized to a Target Guide Count. The guides are then passed to the Guide Deform for an accurate, much faster, and believable simulation.

A new Guide Utility SOP for convenient access to some often used functions for hair curves, including skin snapping, root group creation, Vellum-compatible orient attribute creation, and fast curveu creation.

The completely overhauled Shot Sculpt SOP now accepts guides as a second input and can be used to shot sculpt deforming guides and skin simultaneously.

The Hairgen SOP has a new Blend in Skin Space mode to allow generated curves to be reoriented relative to the skin normal at their root. This is useful in preventing bald spots on short fur and allows for a sparser guide curve distribution when grooming.

The Test Geometry: Capybara SOP now has a Fur option added to the Output parameter.

The new Capybara Sim and Deform recipe is available on the Hair Utils shelf and demonstrates how to use the new Guide deforming workflow.