Hi,

I am not shure about my grooming workflow. When it comes to deformation of my groom, every modification in the hairgen network gets processed at each frame? So every hair with each frizz/clump/smooth etc. is gettin cooked around my dynamic guides at each timestep ?

Thinking of other workflows in Houdini highres geometry often gets processed once, and we deform that data later with light lowres geo. Why this is not possible here?

I find it hard to judge where to put the focus on. More guides for the details with the downside of much slower deformation and simulation, but faster hair generation, or less guides and lots of modifications in the hairgen for fast sims but super slow hairgen.

At the moment i work on a character with a basic groom (2 to 3 million hairs) and hairgenereation takes 3 times longer than rendering (not counting deformation and sim of the guides)… Unfortunately i can not share a hip at the moment.

some advices would be great !

many thanks,

Lucas

Are you leveraging Load From Disk on your guide simulate node? Once you have locked down the groom just write it all to disk. This will provide faster playback to the Hair Generate. Also, on the Groom node you may want to use fewer segments then add a subdivide in the Hair Generate. This is one way to put less load on the simulation. Less density is another way, do you really need 2-3 million strands for that far away shot?

If you have not watched Marc's tutorial on grooming, check it out. There are some tips on how to recover performance.
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/when-can-i-deactivate-the-hair-groom-node/ [www.sidefx.com]

some good suggestions. thanks for that. i just wanted to get shure if every process in the hairgen really needs to get cooked at each frame. clumping is a good example i think. when i need fine clumping details i can not setup such a look in my guide network. cooking such clumps over millions of strands takes ages / and all that on each frame. i thought it might be possible to cook once and deform that geo after, such like deforming highres geo with lowresgeo/pointdeform sop. maybe naive

cheers,

Lucas