I'm using the textured hair material. I'm finding that if I apply a material to my geometry at the SOP level, the textured hair material picks up color from the surface. This is not what I want. I want a material on the ‘skin’, but I only want to use root/tip color in the textured hair material and not have it inherit color from the surface's material.

I'm using hfs9.5.379. I know the docs mention (http://localhost:48628/fur/changingcolor) [localhost] that you need to remove the material to prevent it soaking up the color - but I'd like to use it cause it has most of what I need, and only one property I don't. Is there not a compromise?

Easy enough I thought, I'll just alter the hair SHOP network to not use any of the color attributes from the surface material it's sprouting from. I've tried diving into the SHOP net in the auto generated fur network, but I fail to understand where in the hair SHOP it's picking up the surface's material color. Strangely, unplugging nodes in the SHOP doesn't affect the render. Are SHOPS auto compiled or do I need to flag an update (houdini noob here)? I'm lost, any directions?

I've attached a file, if someone could tell me how to prevent the surface color from bleeding into the hair I'd appreciate it.

Hopefully this is what you want.


HTH

Well, unfortunately I forgot to mention that I'm trying to avoid assigning the material at the OBJ geometry (top) level. Your scene gives the expected result, but it's not a valid solution in my case. I'm reading in some OBJ's from a file SOP and assigning materials at the SOP level. The obj comes in as multiple groups so I'm putting a shader on the eyeballs, skin, etc. Thanks for taking a look - I'm still digging for the answer myself.

Normally, I don't use the shelf tool to make hair or fur so I don't have this problem. Still this should be simple to fix. Hopefully, this is more of what you wanted to accomplish.


HTH

Yes! This is a nice solution. Thank you.

My pesky brain however is still puzzled where the surface color is actually transferred to the hairs in the first place. Any illumination on this would be conceptually helpful. Is this something that happens behind the scenes in the fur SOP? Or perhaps is there a node in the fur network that explicitly gives the hair a default color independent of the textured hair SHOP?

pinkwerks
Yes! This is a nice solution. Thank you.

My pesky brain however is still puzzled where the surface color is actually transferred to the hairs in the first place. Any illumination on this would be conceptually helpful. Is this something that happens behind the scenes in the fur SOP? Or perhaps is there a node in the fur network that explicitly gives the hair a default color independent of the textured hair SHOP?

Pinkwerks,

Like I said before, I usually don't use the shelf tools for hair and fur so I didn't even bother to look at it. However since you asked, I took a closer look at it and found where it's getting the color–simple really when you think about it. Since in your case it appears to be getting it from the grid(the skin in this case), all you have to do to break this connection is to look at the skin tab on the fur node in your example. In the Transfer Attributes field, it has a * which indicated that all the attributes for your Skin (/obj/grid_object1) is being transferred to the fur. Just delete the * and now nothing gets transferred to the fur from the Skin object and you will get the result you wanted.

cheers