Liesbeth Levick

We are aware that this is an issue and we are working on a solution.

In the mean time, here is a setup that you can use to sculpt (guide groom) guides on one frame and apply those edits to multiple frames. It doesn't have the advantages of the Shot Sculpt interface, so it's more of a hassle to set up for each frame that you want to sculpt on but it gives good results. It takes the differences (deltas) for the frame you sculpted on before and after the sculpt, and applies those differences to all the frames in the tangent space of the guides (so if your character rotates for instance, the deltas will still be applied properly). There is then a blendshape node which you can use to keyframe which frames you want the sculpt applied to.

Much like the Shot Sculpt node though, one of the main limitations is that if you have something very "explody" from a simulation, smoothing it out on the problem frame through sculpting is not going to apply well to other frames that have points in a very different shape. In that case it's better to apply some sort of procedural smoothing to all the problem guides for the relevant frames first. The simplest is probably to blend the problem guides to the guide deformed guides for the problem frames. Then sculpt and apply the tangent space deltas on top of that procedural fix.

In this file there is a "tangent_space_deltas_guides" subnet. It takes five inputs, but because subnets only allow four inputs, I had to add a spare input parameter. I recommend turning this subnet into an HDA with five inputs instead (make the spare input the fifth input). If you do that it's probably worth adding the blendshape node into the HDA too and promoting the blend parameter.

I hope that helps.

LwrCartwright
Is this method still working in Houdini 21?

Currently attempting a groom and after plugging my guide groom (fresh scene) into a guide deform (groom 1st input, static model 2nd input, animation 3rd input) the guides stayed in place and didn’t move with the animation. Does anyone know why this might be and if there’s a fix?

It should still work. Is this at the Object level or in SOPs? Are there any errors or warnings? If you do a blendshape between your static model and your animation does it work without scrambling the points? Have you tried a guide skin attribute lookup on your guides before the guide deform with the static skin as the second input?

Please log a bug!