Hey all,

I'm trying to procedurally create cloth. Maya has a really nice cloth material. Does Houdini have something equivalent? I have been rather unsuccessful at creating something that actually renders properly. Gingham seems to be the closest thing I can find. It renders great up close just like any fabric would, but when I back off the displacement starts disecting the object into bigger pieces.

This is what my node network looks like

uvcoords –> gingham –> complement –> displacement amount (of displace along normals node).

Gingham checker size .002
Blur .6
Displacement Amount Scale - .01

This occurs whether I start a network from scratch or use the mantra surface and plug into it.

Any suggestions?
Thanks

Garrett
BYU ANIMATION

Gingham seems to not anti-alias itself very well. This is very apparent for micro-polygon rendering, but almost disappearing for ray tracing, presumably because pixel sampling in ray tracing does monte carlo sampling on the pattern effectively. As a first step for micro-poly you normally crank up shading quality on the object (Render Tab). Next thing would be to take a look on a pattern itself, using the right blur size for a screen space pattern size.

I talked with my professor and his solution really helped.

In the Mantra Render Node under the “Dicing” tab there is a parameter called Z-importance. It is default set at 0, if you drag it up to .5 or 1 it actually helps out a ton. I believe it has to do with the Z-depth of the object. Also the dicing quality inside the actual geometry of the object seems to help.

Thanks for the reply.

Garrett
BYU ANIMATION

Both these setting cause the same thing. Smaller micro-polygon on the screen == better sampling of underlying pattern.