L O N G H A I R S I M!
In September 2023, I joined Crash Landing Studio to do cloth & hair simulation for their stunning animation works, but as there were more and more shots to handle, I realized that I need to clean up my node network and make my pipeline more clear and efficient.
Basically I did all of these to save my time. But of course, this pipeline isn’t build in a day. There are many versions and each update makes it better and handier to use.
Well CLS is a place for volunteer artists (we don’t get salaries from that), and everyone has flexible schedules. So I guess I can post these docs publicly.
The overall view
Ame
Gura
Ina
Pink nodes are importing / key output nodes, green nodes are those you should mainly tweak parameters on, and the yellow nodes are exporting / cache nodes.
We have 3 main characters: Gura, Ame and Ina. Each sim pipline is nearly identical, so I’ll take Ame’s as an example.
Ame’s sim pipeline
WARNING: this is the old file I/O instruction and will not used in the future, for I’m trying to replace these process with scripting. See:
Advanced Level Scripting in Cloth Sim Pipeline
In Blender I would select only the body geo (don’t forget Gura’s tails!) and expert as alembic. You’ll also need to notice the end frame and set it in Houdini.
We also need to export cameras as alembic file and import to the scene. After chosen camera file in this alembic archive node, press build or update hierarchy and a same camera is generated.
And also you need to dive inside to set a correct camera resolution.
Since we use GitHub to share project files and Dropbox to store large files like sims and rendering & comp images, we should copy & paste our sim output to the corresponding S drive path, so other people can see the sim on their own computers.
If you don’t setup Dropbox and S drive correctly, ask Myxo (our leader) about that.
For example, for the shot in:
github\DD103\shots\C_gawrzilla_06\020
We need to move sim outputs to:
S:\_projects\Gawrzilla\shots\06_020\sim
When exporting from Houdini it will export material groups too, and in Blender select the sim first, select original hair, press ctrl L and choose link materials, then the materials will be copied to sim objects.
Sometimes things in Blender is too much labor… Since I learnt how to use MEL & Python in Maya to save a lot of time for me, I may consider using Python scripts in Blender someday, too.
