I'm coming from Maya, so may use the wrong terms with apologies, but I'd like something that would be aware of the location of the tips of the spikes in relation to the skinned surface and the distance between them, so they don't ever overlap.
Meaning the tips don't intersect but compress together.
Think of it as pushing your thumb into a plastic hairbrush and tips cluster together instead of criss-crossing each other.
It'd need to be procedural so we can feed in different characters, and ideally something we can use in Maya via Houdini engine.
We'd want to put base-points of spike and tips into tuples, but not manually as there will be hundreds of them
I'm looking for pointers on any nodes that already exist that may help this (ie intersectionanalysis?) or a method to iterate over a group of tips, perhaps getting its distance and angle at bind and moving them away.
Something like a loop perhaps:
for each other tip within x distance of tip: if closer than the bind position: move tip along vector away from point.
Simplified:
Three spikes are 90' pyramids on a flat three-face plane viewed from the side.
The third face pivots toward the other two so that normally the spikes would intersect, but Houdini rotates the second spike to the left (its pivot at the skin surface) and the right spike to the right, so they never collide.
We don't have the capacity to simulate/cache this across all characters, so it'd need to iterate over the points on frame update.
Is this even possible?
Where would I start? The solution could include hiring a Houdini TD who can do this.
Thanks!
