Hey guys,
here's a little preview of an HDA I've been working on for the last two months. It's still very much work in progress but I wanted to share this already with you guys It allows you to paint/project masks/displacement maps and it records everything, so you can paint stuff and reproject with a different texture and you can scroll through a history of every brush stroke.

Here's the link :
https://youtu.be/1khaq9n7p7A3 [youtu.be]

All the best,
Wout

A render to show the result of my HDA generating a displacement map with controls for density/ /orientation/texture…

The tool generates a mask/height map which means I can blend the individual projections. In this render, there are about 7000 projections, blended together with an over blend mode using the alpha embedded in the texture file.

Wow man, that's real cool! If I were to sculpt some individual pore alphas, could you try them out with your tool on the pig? Really curious to see how it would turn out? I've thought about this before, think the concept is called texture bombing but not sure about it … my idea was to do instancing of planar UV projectors over the body and bake each one and merge them into one map that blends between all of the projections, but didn't think it was possible at the moment. I guess you've taken a different approach to it. This could be an awesome tool if pushed in the right direction and made more robust

Hi !

Sure I'd love to !

That's really quite impressive. Did you handle the painting entirely through python? And what's the renderer? Mantra?

The built in houdini tools for that are quite lackluster as far as I know. And the drawcurve sop being the only real option for scattering like this, and that slows down to a crawl going upwards of 20 strokes.

I'd love to play around with this, if you need someone for beta testing. I'm an unchallenged expert in breaking things, haha.

Wout Tengrootenhuysen
A render to show the result of my HDA generating a displacement map with controls for density/ /orientation/texture…

The tool generates a mask/height map which means I can blend the individual projections. In this render, there are about 7000 projections, blended together with an over blend mode using the alpha embedded in the texture file.

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Can you do this procedurally?

Hi Bennel,

yes it's all procedural, you can choose the amount of projections, the density, I'm gonna add a randomisation tab to it, so you can link the size to intensity, random orientations stuff like that. I'm working on the orientation with guides right now

What do you mean guides?

A way to control the orientation of the projections based on points and direction vectors

How do you add color onto and between the scales on the pig head? Can you layer or mix different displacements? I'm asking because of this paper.

Yes, you can layer and mix the heightmap, with different blending modes, over, under, add subtract, multiply.

What about using curves to influence the flow of scales and pores? Also, since scales can't stretch in real life, can you prevent them from stretching using the HDA?

I think that functionality will be provided by the guides I'm currently working on. As for the stretching, well, that depends on the projection settings. There are controls for projection angle, depth, etc. The “tighter” the settings, the less stretching there will be.

Then this HDA has potential!

Thanks ! I'm pretty excited about it. Just made a lot of progress with adding guides in an super intuitive way. Cool cool cool

One more thing. Can you remove individual scales on the pig with a brush?

Not at the moment, but that should be fairly simple to add. Just a matter of selecting and deleting the right point.

I just thought of something else. What about wrinkles that would influence the formation of scales like on this ostrich's foot?

Hm, I think you can do that by projecting/painting a wrinkle texture and then blend it with the scales with an over blend mode. Cool picture !

I've uploaded this video to be clear about what I was talking about before which is scales stretching. The scales are green and the skin underneath is red to show the range of stretch. Would this still be possible with your HDA? The scales are geometry.