Hello!

Anyone else having issues getting the Hair Brush Tools to work correctly?
I am trying to groom my guides with the Brush Tools but I have a lot of issues working with the Brush Tools:

- Lift Brush doesn't seem to work in most cases? How can I lift hair guides from the skin?? It doesnt seem to work for me.

- The Surface Brush pushes hair inside the skin surface instead of keeping it over the skin surface?

- The Lift Option has no effect in any of the Brush Tools?

- No Settings or effect by using a Wacom Tablet? The Brush settings feel very limited.

- Smooth Brush is painfully Slow and doesnt seem to work on guides at all? (cooks forever…)

Really having a hard time doing grooming in an artistic way with the Brush Tools in the state they are atm. Maybe I am doing something wrong?

Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.

Yep - they don't work properly. There should be enough other brushes to get something but those tools are as bad as you've described.

After some more tests I noticed that the Brush Tools dont work correct on Unclosed Geometry. After doing polyfill the brushes lift option and surface brush work. Smooth brush still seems to have issues and I miss Wacom Pressure options to control strength etc. (I know can customize the wrangles inside the guidegroom) But there should be some better default artist friendly options.

Also I Hope one day houdini will get a real brush engine instead of faking things with the stroke SOP, The paint SOP could need some optimization too, espcially for wacom tablets. It feels very limited and clumsy to change settings etc.

The Guide Process toolset does work well enough though. Painting the smooth and lift attributes work at a reasonable speed but you may have to set their attribute to 0, aka flood fill it, before painting.

Edit: I'm guessing there will be new tools written for H17 that replace these old ones. The Curve Advect is running at an incredible speed compared to say Smooth.

Doudini
After some more tests I noticed that the Brush Tools dont work correct on Unclosed Geometry. After doing polyfill the brushes lift option and surface brush work. Smooth brush still seems to have issues and I miss Wacom Pressure options to control strength etc. (I know can customize the wrangles inside the guidegroom) But there should be some better default artist friendly options.

Also I Hope one day houdini will get a real brush engine instead of faking things with the stroke SOP, The paint SOP could need some optimization too, espcially for wacom tablets. It feels very limited and clumsy to change settings etc.

I'm glad you found that this was partly due to open geometry. This is probably something we can fix internally, as most operators that rely on generating VDBs (as these do) should close the geometry as a preprocess step.

We do have some limitations still with the stroke SOP & state which we hope to address. But the tools that are in place should of course work out of the box, so please report any remaining issues as bugs.

So if you have geometry you cannot close(because the mesh will be a guide groom for an animation), are you out of luck to groom the fur with brushes? These issues are the issues I've been having