ralphymeijer

Probably the hou.Node.dependents() function will do the trick.

Hey guys,

I'm running into an issue with the new guide deform in 18.499 and I'm hoping someone can help me in the right direction. Maybe I'm using it wrong so please correct me if I do so.

In our pipeline we get a groom from Maya exported as alembic curves. These are all the render hairs. In Houdini I'm filtering a percentage of it that I can use for simulation or other things I need to do with them. When I'm done I can use these guide curves to deform the full groom. Obviously the Guide deform should be able to do this. The new guide deform in 18.499 is allready a lot better but I'm still getting artifacts.

So this is the full patch of hair as an example.


These are the guides I'm extracting:


The guides that are deformed:


So when I use the guide deform with barycentric weights it comes pretty close but there are artifact where the tips are not deformed correctly.


Even if I generate new hairs from the guides with the hairgen sop and tick on computes weights. And use the existing weights mode it still has the issue with the tips.



With the existing weights it is definitely following the guides better. I could even try to compute the weights myself on the original render groom. However I would still run into the tips issue.

In the past we just made sure we had enough guides and generate new render hairs from that. We sort of got away with that but it's not as accurate as deforming the original groom.

Hopefully someone can shed a light on it.

Thanks in advance!

Ralph

Hey what are you using for rendering in Maya. We do the same thing but use vray proxies to do the hair rendering. Works really well with extra attributes. I'm sure there is a similar workflow possible with any other renderer. You are correct that in maya you can't read extra attributes from curves.

Good luck!

Ralph