I asked on the Illume forum but I'll ask again here: Does anyone have any clue about how to set a custom husk procedural?

Check this post https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/85494/#post-369964 [www.sidefx.com]

And Houdini 20's keynote feather hip files, there's a custom feather procedural https://www.sidefx.com/houdini-hive/houdini-20-hive/#feathers [www.sidefx.com]

I'd agree that forum post is not a bad place to begin, and let's see whether that provides enough context for more targeted questions. Either way, let me know and I'll pick it up from there.

@robp_sidefx - are you able to give a steer on whether it would be possible enable the SOP GuideDeform 'Arbitrary Geometry' mode within the current Solaris Hair Procedural? We'd be up for customising the hair_graph.bgeo.sc (have had success following the steps mentioned on the other thread to avoid the issue of moving roots to the skin) but only to the level of bypassing/enabling parts of the existing graph.
Does the existing embedded graph have the logic for enabling 'Arbitrary Geometry' in deformation mode and it's just not exposed at the user level, or is the graph a more stripped back implementation?

If it's a no go with hacking the existing hair_graph.bgeo.sc, would implementing that behaviour into the Hair Procedural be a quick and easy thing for Sidefx to do.. or is there a good reason why it's not there already?

many thanks

Ben Toogood Aardman
@robp_sidefx - are you able to give a steer on whether it would be possible enable the SOP GuideDeform 'Arbitrary Geometry' mode within the current Solaris Hair Procedural? We'd be up for customising the hair_graph.bgeo.sc (have had success following the steps mentioned on the other thread to avoid the issue of moving roots to the skin) but only to the level of bypassing/enabling parts of the existing graph.
Does the existing embedded graph have the logic for enabling 'Arbitrary Geometry' in deformation mode and it's just not exposed at the user level, or is the graph a more stripped back implementation?

If it's a no go with hacking the existing hair_graph.bgeo.sc, would implementing that behaviour into the Hair Procedural be a quick and easy thing for Sidefx to do.. or is there a good reason why it's not there already?

many thanks

Well, it's not there mainly because it's the Hair Procedural

It doesn't look like the embedded graph has removed that logic, so customizing the existing graph may work; though it's hard to tell if it's a quick and easy thing or not. We have other ideas/plans in this space (nothing to announce/discuss yet though), so it isn't likely that we'd change the hair procedural this way. But feel free to give it a try, and keep us posted if you wish!

Thanks Goldleaf - I'll take a look and see if we can bodge our way there.

If it helps for future idea/plans, our specific use-case is deforming costume pieces composed of many curves (woven cloth, knitted wool, fuzzy felt) etc where it's not feasible to cache them directly from the rig.

The 'Arbitrary Geometry' mode in SOPs land GuideDeform does the job - it'd just be a fantastic streamliner to have it happen as a render time procedural.

Many thanks
Ben

Just for anyone landing on this thread in the future: yes, it is possible to use a modified version of the hair_deform.bgeo.sc which comes with the Hair Procedural to deform arbitrary geometry, and I've attached a copy of the custom file we ended up with to this post. It's worked for our purposes so far - fingers crossed it's helpful to someone else down the line. Feel free to give it a whirl.

cheers

Ben Toogood Aardman
Just for anyone landing on this thread in the future: yes, it is possible to use a modified version of the hair_deform.bgeo.sc which comes with the Hair Procedural to deform arbitrary geometry, and I've attached a copy of the custom file we ended up with to this post. It's worked for our purposes so far - fingers crossed it's helpful to someone else down the line. Feel free to give it a whirl.

cheers

Were you successful with creating geometry at render time, or just deforming existing geometry? I'm hoping to just slightly modify the hair procedural to generate blades of grass, but I'm running into errors with outputting a mesh as opposed to a basis curve, as well as some checksum errors from "invoke.py". I'm curious to hear more about your approach!

sleister
I'm running into errors with outputting a mesh as opposed to a basis curve, as well as some checksum errors from "invoke.py".

By default, we do not use any license when running procedurals, but we limit this to:
* unmodified runprocedurals.py
* unmodified invokegraph.py
* SideFX-provided procedurals (hair, ocean, RBD, etc)
* custom SOP graph procedurals that only generate/modify curves/points

At the point that the above becomes too restrictive, you can add --allowed-procedurals=allas a command-line argument to husk. This will remove all limitations, but will use a Houdini Engine license during procedural execution (and only during the execution - the license is returned immediately after, not held for the duration of the render).