Hi all. I'd like to know how to take 2 3d objects into Houdini and deform one into the shape of the other even though the 2 object may not share the same vertices. For example, 2 noses. One nose is straight the other is not (bigger, more roundish). I'd like to see the straight nose take the shape of the bigger nose (or vice versa). I'm assuming it's done with deformations of some sort with the SOPs.

Thanks folks.

There's two ways to approach this (maybe more..), one is by assigning uv's to both and then morphing based on them. Obviuosly the uv's need to be within the same range on both objects. The difficulty with irregular objects is getting the boundaries to have the same values. I put an otl up on exchange somewhere that morphs a sphere into a box using this technique so you can see how it works by having a look at that.
The other way I know of is feature based, you basically would have to capture one surface and then align your capture system to the second object, thus dragging the surface along to match the new shape. This will only ever give you an approximate alignment you then have to either then do a 2d morph in post or ray one surface onto the other to get a really good match.
To do the capturing you could try using the wire capture/deform sop or a point lattice (lattice sop) or on odForce I posted up some code to do it using RBF's
http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=4033&st=12 [odforce.net]

Of course if its just something really simple I'd probably just use an edit sop and remodel one of the shapes to match the other one -

Thanks, man. Would you say a person's face in 3d would be a candidate for (simple or more complex deformation)?

mGuns

I think it's more a question of how often you need to do it…
It might take a day with an edit sop to match one face roughly to another, and it might take a day to “rig” it so you can do it more quickly in the future. You win in the second case when you need to do it 100 times, as with many things in Houdini it's when you try and scale solutions up to big problems that you start winning.

My goal is a very, very fast solution (under 10 minutes at least). Your thougthts?

mGuns

I assume then you want a repeatable solution that takes 10 minutes. In that case I'd look at a “rigged” solution. Make a generic head and “rig” it using one of the above methods. Then it will just be a case of moving a minimum set of “feature” points from your generic model onto the current specimen. Of course it will never match precisely without tweaking it, but you can get closer by possibly finishing off with a ray sop using ray by minimum distance.
Take a look at the odforce link I posted it has some examples in it where I tried to do exactly what you are asking about. There are pictures as well as hip files.