Is there a way to quickly select individual hairs while grooming with the Screen or Surface brush ?

When tweaking plain vanilla polygons, or primitives as some call them, I can press and hold the "S" key to change the selection. But that doesn't seem to work with hair primitives.

The only way seems to actually switch to the select tool , select some hair primitives and switch back to the groom brush, do some grooming, rinse and repeat. Which is so 90's and slows down the whole process.

Is there a way to keep the groom brush active while selecting hair prims ?

Also, there seems to be no visual feedback when selecting single hair strands, only a rollover highlight. Seems I have to assume I selected the correct ones and check by grooming. Is there a way to highlight the current selected strands ?

Thanks,

R.

Figured a workaround that might be interesting, when I add a "visibility" node after the Groom, set to "hide selected prims" and select all with a * in the input field, but then display the groom, all guides turn colorless but the selected guides are highlighted. So that way you can actually see what guides you're grooming.

Also; strangely enough when using the tiny "primitive group" selection arrow in the groom panel instead of the default primitive selection, you only have to hit Enter to confirm the selection and can continue grooming without having to switch tools. It's a bit less frustrating then having to switch tools all the time.

R.

toonafish
Also; strangely enough when using the tiny "primitive group" selection arrow in the groom panel instead of the default primitive selection, you only have to hit Enter to confirm the selection and can continue grooming without having to switch tools. It's a bit less frustrating then having to switch tools all the time.

Yep, this is what I do. Works well enough, but still a bit clunky.

toonafish
Also; strangely enough when using the tiny "primitive group" selection arrow in the groom panel instead of the default primitive selection, you only have to hit Enter to confirm the selection and can continue grooming without having to switch tools. It's a bit less frustrating then having to switch tools all the time.

You don't want to change the selection on the guide groom node. The selection is not recorded with each stroke, thereby the groom becomes non-procedural and can't be played back since the history of selections is lost.

If you need to apply the guide groom to a subset of curves, I would use a separate guide groom for each selection. This way if the input changes upstream, it's not quite as much work that has to be redone from scratch.

Is that really the official way to groom ? That would be even worse then my current workaround.

Nodal History is nice, but not when it completely beats its purpose and makes everything take three times longer with a ridiculous workflow.

Sometimes working in Houdini feels like eating soup with a knife :-/

R.

toonafish
Is that really the official way to groom ? That would be even worse then my current workaround.

Not really, it's a by product of an incomplete implementation of the group feature on the guide groom.

You can change the group, but doing so means the group can't replay strokes. That might not matter to you, but in my experience the model is often changed upstream, which requires replaying strokes to update. Even without a model change, it's often nice to be able to go back to an earlier node to do some tweaks than having to do all grooming on the last node in the chain.

jsmack

toonafish
Is that really the official way to groom ? That would be even worse then my current workaround.

Not really, it's a by product of an incomplete implementation of the group feature on the guide groom.

Yep, lots of room for improvement there.

btw, did anyone get this "Toggle Display" for hiding hair from the viewport working :
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/shelf/groom_togglehairdisplay.html [www.sidefx.com]

I tried all kinds of trickery, but it seems broken and there seems to be no way to hide the hairgen only from the viewport, but not from the render. Even disabling the Display flag from the Hair Output only works as long as you're inside the Hairgen SOP.

I ran into this problem some time ago and couldn't find a solution, so maybe more luck this time.

toonafish

jsmack

toonafish
Is that really the official way to groom ? That would be even worse then my current workaround.

Not really, it's a by product of an incomplete implementation of the group feature on the guide groom.

Yep, lots of room for improvement there.

btw, did anyone get this "Toggle Display" for hiding hair from the viewport working :
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/shelf/groom_togglehairdisplay.html [www.sidefx.com]

I tried all kinds of trickery, but it seems broken and there seems to be no way to hide the hairgen only from the viewport, but not from the render. Even disabling the Display flag from the Hair Output only works as long as you're inside the Hairgen SOP.

I ran into this problem some time ago and couldn't find a solution, so maybe more luck this time.

It's not different than any other object. Turn off the display flag, and add it to force render objects for render. Only rendering the forced object list is the most common render strategy for Houdini.

jsmack
It's not different than any other object. Turn off the display flag, and add it to force render objects for render. Only rendering the forced object list is the most common render strategy for Houdini.

Did you actually try that ?

Because that’s my thought as well, and peeps keep pointing that out to me, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to hide the HairGen from display only and still render it. Not with the "Togglehairdisplay", neither by adding a Null inside the HairGen SOP and toggling the display visibility by having the Null taking care of that.

This works with any other plain vanilla object, but not with the HairGen it seems. As soon as I exit the HairGen SOP, the hair is visible again.

Sorry if I missed this above, but are you using the Houdini hair shelf tools? If you are, definitely consider switching to building your hair from scratch. There is so much nonsense in the default tools and it really makes the whole process feel clunky. I did a writeup of my workflow here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/77808/ [www.sidefx.com] Nothing fancy, but it works well for my purposes and has a more artist-friendly, XGen type of feel.

toonafish

jsmack
It's not different than any other object. Turn off the display flag, and add it to force render objects for render. Only rendering the forced object list is the most common render strategy for Houdini.

Did you actually try that ?

Because that’s my thought as well, and peeps keep pointing that out to me, but no matter what I do, I can’t seem to hide the HairGen from display only and still render it. Not with the "Togglehairdisplay", neither by adding a Null inside the HairGen SOP and toggling the display visibility by having the Null taking care of that.

This works with any other plain vanilla object, but not with the HairGen it seems. As soon as I exit the HairGen SOP, the hair is visible again.

Yes, it works as described.

Hey, thanks for the video.

Completely hiding the HairGen from display and render as you show in your video works fine here as well. That's not the issue.

But what I mean is to hide the HairGen from display only, so that it still renders by disabling just the display flag in the HairGen SOP and enabling it on the Null.

When I do that, as soon as I exit the HairGen SOP, the hair is visible again.

BrianHanke
Sorry if I missed this above, but are you using the Houdini hair shelf tools? If you are, definitely consider switching to building your hair from scratch. There is so much nonsense in the default tools and it really makes the whole process feel clunky. I did a writeup of my workflow here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/77808/ [www.sidefx.com] Nothing fancy, but it works well for my purposes and has a more artist-friendly, XGen type of feel.

Hey, thanks. That looks like an interesting workflow for long hair. Gonna check it for sure.

Cheers,

R.

toonafish
Completely hiding the HairGen from display and render as you show in your video works fine here as well. That's not the issue.

But what I mean is to hide the HairGen from display only, so that it still renders by disabling just the display flag in the HairGen SOP and enabling it on the Null.

When I do that, as soon as I exit the HairGen SOP, the hair is visible again.

Of course, because the display flag inside the hairgen doesn't mean anything. The output node is used to send to the rest of the hairgen nodes. You'll see if you go to the level between the editable subnet and the object level that the hairgen has quite a bit more work to do after the groom nodes. If moving the flag had any effect then the node wouldn't work at all.

Use the object level flags to control visibility. Sop level flags are not for controlling visibility in the viewport/render. They are for determining the end point of a geometry network. The separate render/display flags are for setting different end points for render and interactive display. Output nodes always takes precedence over flags.

jsmack
Use the object level flags to control visibility. Sop level flags are not for controlling visibility in the viewport/render. They are for determining the end point of a geometry network. The separate render/display flags are for setting different end points for render and interactive display. Output nodes always takes precedence over flags.

Hey thanks.

Brilliant, so like I said, the display toggle doesn't work. Because of the magical logic of Houdini I guess.

But I suppose the question still stands, how does one hide the HairGen only from display and not from the render ?

Cheers,

R.

toonafish

jsmack
Use the object level flags to control visibility. Sop level flags are not for controlling visibility in the viewport/render. They are for determining the end point of a geometry network. The separate render/display flags are for setting different end points for render and interactive display. Output nodes always takes precedence over flags.

Hey thanks.

Brilliant, so like I said, the display toggle doesn't work. Because of the magical logic of Houdini I guess.

But I suppose the question still stands, how does one hide the HairGen only from display and not from the render ?

Cheers,

R.

I'm not sure how this question isn't answered. Use the Object level flags. The SOP flags are not used for this.

Either you're using a different Houdini, or there's some strange miscommunication going on here.

I'm not trying to hide the HairGen from Display and Render simultaneous, ONLY from Display.

I thought maybe it's because you're using 18.5.499 and I'm still on 18.5.462 because Redshift doesn't support 499 yet, but I checked both and there's no separate Display / Render flag at Object level for the HairGen in 499 as well.

For a Geo node one can set the Display separately in the Properties panel, but not for the HairGen it seems.

Cheers,

R.

toonafish
Either you're using a different Houdini, or there's some strange miscommunication going on here.

I'm not trying to hide the HairGen from Display and Render simultaneous, ONLY from Display.

I thought maybe it's because you're using 18.5.499 and I'm still on 18.5.462 because Redshift doesn't support 499 yet, but I checked both and there's no separate Display / Render flag at Object level for the HairGen in 499 as well.

For a Geo node one can set the Display separately in the Properties panel, but not for the HairGen it seems.

Cheers,

R.

toonafish
I thought maybe it's because you're using 18.5.499 and I'm still on 18.5.462 because Redshift doesn't support 499 yet, but I checked both and there's no separate Display / Render flag at Object level for the HairGen in 499 as well.

There hasn't been separate display and render flags in almost 20 years.

Don't use flags to set what is shown in the render. The force object list configures the renderable objects regardless of flags. This is the way to control and objects render/display visibility independently.

jsmack
It's not different than any other object. Turn off the display flag, and add it to force render objects for render. Only rendering the forced object list is the most common render strategy for Houdini.

jsmack
There hasn't been separate display and render flags in almost 20 years.

Don't use flags to set what is shown in the render. The force object list configures the renderable objects regardless of flags. This is the way to control and objects render/display visibility independently.

Hey thanks.

Well, there is a display toggle in the Geo SOP to hide an object only from the viewport. In fact there's 2 ways to do that.

Why it's not a HairGen SOP beats me, since you can easily workaround that by hacking the SOP. So I suppose it wouldn't be hard to add a simple toggle to the parameters.

But then, this is Houdini....