Houdini 20.0 Shelf tools

Granular Sheet shelf tool

Fills the surface of an object with densely packed grains and makes constraints to hold them together.

On this page

Overview

Note

This tool is a technical demo of alternate uses for the POP Grains tool.

Fills the surface of an object with densely packed grains and makes constraints to hold them together, and is much denser than the Granular Solid. This provides resistance to bending, resulting in a stretch sheet. It is useful for simulating simple cloth, such as a blanket or drapes.

This tool can be thought of as a simple cloth solver. It results in cloth-like behavior because there are no collisions between particles since they are all right next to each other and constrained. An advantage of using this tool for simple cloth simulations is that it’s very stable and faster in certain instances.

Note

This shelf tool puts down a Point Deform SOP in the geometry network, to allow the skin to deform with the grains. It deforms the high resolution mesh according to the animated low resolution mesh.

For more information, see PBD vs FEM.

Note

This can also be used on 3D objects, but it is important to note that grains are only generated on the surface. For example, if this tool is used on a box, the box will be hollow.

Using Granular Sheet

  1. Select the object to convert to a Granular Sheet.

  2. Click the Granular Sheet tool on the Grains tab.

The following are a couple of examples of things you can use the Granular Sheet tool for.

For specific parameter information, see the POP Grains help.

Shelf tools

Using the shelf

  • Customize the shelf

    How to change the look of the shelf, change and rearrange its contents, and create your own shelf tools.

Technical