Bullit wrote:I'll have my sword drawn if they don't have cloth at same level of Cinema 4D or 3dsMax...
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My question was more along the lines that if his modeling strategy could be extended for other parts of Houdini, animation, simulation. Let's say i want to add a specific noise - probably something more complex but just for the sake of simplicity- to an animation can an HDA be useful for it?
Regarding Cloth sim, I think there applies the 'Inverse Maya rule'. Because nCloth in Maya is still one of top solutions, perhaps they will not try to compete, seriously. BTW a lot of factory nodes are HDA, user is able to dive in and copy something. Smoke fluids are pretty much modular, assembled of many smaller HDAs, like small noise, big noise, solver, something like that. Now it's about user and task, to make decision, does it worth to go with completely procedural approach. Best way is to try, it seems to be not easy to explain by words. Imho, example of
new hair tools in H is looking like simulation used for static hair styling.
Ok back to business, here's another dirty trick that surprisingly turned out well. It joins a lot of overlapped curves at intersections in 2d space, also it performs a cleanup of 'rests'. This is needed here to supply the appropriate input for Polyexpand 2d or PolyWire SOP (here's Polyexpand 2d in action), these two are able to do extrusions along many overlapped curves, nicely joined - if - there is appropriate input, like edges of mesh.
A lot of overlapped curves, that I had with 'small harness system' here, well they are not appropriate input. Curvesect SOP is not enough, it wants two separated curves, while I have around 400. And yeah, 'usual' math to find closest point on line or line intersection does not help there, as it considers 'given' points, while nothing is 'given' here. So, tried a bit of brute force, curve segment based approach.
First step is a sort of extrude to get geometry for ray casting, that's Sweep SOP at start. "Core" of method is ray casting (Intersect VOP in H) from actual to next point, exactly along length between them. In Houdini, ray cast length is defined by 'raydir' vector. Finally point is just moved to position created by ray casting.
The rest of nodes in Point VOP belongs to fixing the possible errors immanent to method, like avoiding to ray cast to another curve, moving the ray cast origin to do not catch 'self' geometry, two ray cast/intersect VOP's to get proper midpoint of that moves, fitting into 2d plane as well.
SOPs after that 'core' 'atribvop_main' are: Fuse SOP to weld points, loop for cleaning the 'rest' points that have only one neighbor, cut to allow nice re-sampling in between intersections, (that's Resample SOP), another welding by Fuse Sop, finally, Polyexpand 2d.
Now I have to admit, that manual welding in some standard 3d app, could be a way faster
![Happy :)](./images/smilies/1.gif)
, but well, this is an experiment.
Another nice surprise outside H, is Blender, and Blender's ability to have empty wire frame, and to import '2d polygons' as plain obj file, and.... to fill all them in single action, if needed. Thanks to our member Wesserbro for point out to that 'empty wire frame' ability, here on forum.
![Image](http://www.matkovic.com/anto/biosuit_join_curves.png)