Hello everyone,

Im buidling one of my first groom setups in Houdini.

Its a cool ass tool and I enjoyed it, and I think I have something artistically decent. BUT, im concerned about the technical aspect of the project, because as of right now I create this material, and hair without guides, therefore Im could not make the Hairprocedural node work on stage.

Right now the alembic geometry comes in, and the hair generation happens in a sopcreate node. and I guess the whole network cooks on every frame.

I would appreciate some guidelines from someone, if this is a hard no, or it is still OK, and in production things like this happens.

Hello,
Whether or not you use the hair procedural just depends on your workflow. You can still make the setup you have work with the hair procedural. You can use the hair procedural in deform mode. Deform mode lets you deform the existing hair/render curves using guides.
Even if you don't have guides, you can very easily make some. Here are two easy ways to get guides from the hair curves.
1. Take your main hair/render curves and extract a subset of the curves to be guides (by deleting most of them randomly).
2. The setup you have to generate the hair, duplicate that setup and just generate far fewer curves. Then use those as guides.

I was just working on a project where the guides were lost and I had to generate some based on the final hair/render curves.

Once you have guides that are following the animation (and possibly have sim if you want that too), you only need your render/hair curves to be generated once at a rest frame. So you can just cache 1 frame of the render/hair curves. Then use the hair procedural to deform the render curves using the guides at render time so the hair follows along.

hope that helps.

If you only need hair to follow mesh, easiest solution is to just use skin deform on the hair procedural. No guides needed.

Alembic caches did make issues for us in the past because of face orientation mismatch. Using USD animation caches instead solved the problem.

It worked perfectly, thank you!