I have what I think might be an unusual case for vellum cloth and draping.

I have an alembic animation of a character in a dress.



What I'm wanting to do is to drape the dress onto the character, but I want to do this individually, per frame of the animation.

That is, I don't want to simulate the cloth over the length of the animation but rather, for each frame, I want to drape the dress onto the character without any input (velocity etc) from the previous frame, and without progressing to the next frame during simulation.

I think my main problem is that the vellum drape and solver nodes are both closely tied to the timeline, whereas what I need to be able to take a snapshot of the figure/dress at each frame and then simulate that snapshot for say 30 frames but independent of the main Houdini timeline.

In apps like 3D Max you can simulate without progressing through the timeline but I don't know if it's possible to do this in Houdini.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks

instead of Vellum Drape use Vellum Solver SOP and set Simulation/Simulation Type to Quasistatic and then specify how many iterations you want (Quasistatic Frames) those will happen per frame from input geo from scratch

Brilliant! Saved me yet again.

Thanks so much Tomas.