In order to speed up my workflow and avoid heavy labor, I decided to write some scripts to automatically do all the tedious jobs in the pipeline. Imagine that you have 20 to 30 shots to handle, and every time you deal with a shot you need to do the same process… Soooo boring.

So I created this seamless process between Blender and Houdini! You would only need one click to do a looooot of jobs that could take you minutes per shot when you do it manually.

Such a big time saver! We can play video games while working now.

To see the main cloth & hair sim pipeline, check this:

Cloth & Hair Simulation Pipeline of CLS

…And if I have like 100 shots to handle, I’ll consider write another script to run these scripts on all shots.

Update: I lied. I have only 7 shots but immediately decide to write a for loop to work on all shots at the same time.

What this tool does is:

1. Input shot parameters, run the script, it will copy my sim template folder under the shot folder, and export character & camera alembic. It will also output other data, like end frame and resolution to sim .hip file.
2. I have a hda in sim template, which has buttons to open folders (we have folders for sim, blender animation and sim cache), and another button to export sim cache back to the other blender file, then generate a playblast for me to see if anything goes wrong.
3. some object names in blender file is not that accurate, so I wrote some more codes to find them correctly.
4. I made a class of SimJob to let me input a list of shot numbers to generate a few shots' setup and export animation in a row, so I don't have to do them one by one.

This part is the final codes while “legacy” part is the process I made these tools. The main explanation is in version 1.0 part, while all updated versions are supplements, so I suggest you starting from Version 1.0.

Version 2.0