Hi guys,

Well, since the introduction of the help documents, i have no doubt gained soem understanding of the Houdini Fur procedural and its methods.

I have had some success with its workflow, you can see the results of my site.

http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/769/mousefurtest04xc3.jpg [img132.imageshack.us] <— Last Know Decent Result


But i have come to a dead end and now dont know what to do.

So whats the problem, well..


Since the line sop, copied to the points of the geometry i want to have fur on provides the guide geometry for the fur procedural. I am still left with very limited control.

For that point on i can only control the shape of the fur with Fur Style cvex. This coupled with combed normals provides the direction and style of the fur.

Apart from this i find it very hard to control the actually shape of the fur, the only way i can see it to insert and edit sop before the guide geometry is written out into another OBJ. But the edit sop is quite cumbersome and doesnt provide a true mirror when i use it to manipulate the copied lines and the sculpt feature always leaves me pulling my hair out or starting over.


I have tried Mark Visser's Fuzzy Toolkit, but i cant even get that to run, once i install on my windows xp installation, drop the fur sop and select visibility it crash houdini and i am forced to exit (Segmentation error or something), i tried to install it on ubuntu and it teel me everything has been installed and variables have all been soruced etc and when i jump into Houdini there is no Fuzzy toolkit pulldown. I am using the correct builds of houdini and yet things are going pear shaped.

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=6658 [forums.odforce.net] <– Fuzzy Toolkit

I have emailed Mark, but alas no answer.

So what to do now, normally to gain knowledge about houdini, most of the time i am not the only one who has the same problem, and therefore can find the solution somewhere on the forum. But i have searched the forum and not only does no one else have any problems with Houdini fur i cannot find anyone else who has had considerable success, which is weird (at least here or on odforce).Even the image on the front of the website is nice, but the fur's shape looks like it was made with the fur style cvex. I understand people wanting to protect their files, or they are using it under an nda project but no one else posting their images with it?


I hope someone outthere can help me out in how to actually sculpt fur, thats the solution im looking for, and not just combing directions.


thanks for taking the time to read this, forum memeber and SESI staff. You help/work is always appreciated.

There are some solutions described here:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=6720 [forums.odforce.net]
I actually got mark Visser's plugin to work and it's wonderful. Much better than SESI's, more features out of the box. That is what SESI's solution should have been.
That being said, you can get useful results with SESI's solution.

Dragos

Hi phrenzy84

I managed to get the linux version working by copying the contents of the fuzzytoolkit folder (opt/fuzzytoolkit…..) into the houdini 9.1 directory.

regards

tried that, didnt work. If sourced the fuzzy, ive copied it to multiple locations, /opt/hfs9.1.179 … and to the bin and houdini folders just in case.

When i source it wrong it tell me, but when i get it right, all is right untill i startup houdini and its not there.

You couldnt post a screenshot, of the process you made in the terminal, and what directory the file is, i get the impression that ive done it all wrong but it isnt saying so.


cheers.


andy

If you feel lucky, you could just copy the otl's and all the things over to your $HOME/houdini9.1 directory.

If you unzip the package there is a tar archive in it, you need to untar/zip that one as well. What you get is a directory with some of the dirs you also find in in $HOME/houdini9.1 so it is not hard to figure out where goes what. Just beware with overwriting files etc (there is an OPlibraries for example, i am sure you want to keep yours intact).

Fire up houdini, install the OTL's and you are set to go. When you go to SOP you should see a Fuzzy Toolkit in the TAB menu.

There is no need to run the installer script.

If you don't feel lucky and things aren't working, try once more with running the installer. You should specify where you want the Fuzzy stuff to be placed, /opt/furry might be a good idea. Then source houdini_setup, go to /opt/furry, source the fuzzytoolkit_setup_bash and then start houdini. Now you can start houdini.

Pagefan, ive done eveything you have mentioned over and over.

And as for coping the otls. There isnt a single otl in the fuzzy toolkit directory.

Its quite hard to figure out where to put these files, i dont see an GF folder, or even a place to put these SOP's. There are a dozen folders in the Houdini directory named sop, and most are related to the documentation of Houdini and other are samples files that have two or three files in them.

The last thing i want to do is break this installation.

Thanks for the help everyone but it looks like another dead end. It looks like anyone short of a walkthough wont get me far, so thanks for your time.

Hi phrenzy

the way pagefan described it is exactly the way I done it. The installation initially installed the fuzzytoolkit in /opt/fuzzytoolkit. There is definately a otl folder in the fuzzytoolkit. I copied all files and added them to the relevant folders in my $HOME/houdini9.1 folder

regards

Here is a screen shot of the install directory. I have installed it just as they wanted me to.

http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/3858/screenshottv6.png [img255.imageshack.us]

oh well


- andy



edit:

well its looks like i was doing everything right.

Hi Mark,

The 32bit Linux seems to only have an include dir and a lib dir, no OTLs, Config, OPlibraries etc…

Cheers,

Peter B

That was from pbowmar over at odforce, guess if mark makes a new build i might be able to try it out. .

Now i wish i had stated im using 32bit.

I didn't know there are still people using 32-bit on linux else i would have asked! Hope you get it working now.

phrenzy84
That was from pbowmar over at odforce, guess if mark makes a new build i might be able to try it out. .

Now i wish i had stated im using 32bit.

Hey phrenzy, sorry for the confusion. The 32-bit linux version was indeed corrupt.

I just released an update, 0.9.17, with clean versions for 32-bit windows, and 32 or 64-bit linux. Available here: http://www.orthonormalsoftware.com [orthonormalsoftware.com]

cheers,
-Mark

ahh cheers mark.

Hope i can create some decent images, although houdini Fur is good (and there is one project in particular i will use it for), i have a feeling yours is a little more flexible.

thanks again mate, for creating this.


-andy