CHARACTER FX
CFX in Houdini 19 introduces a beta release of a completely redesigned muscle, tissue and skin simulation system along with a new iteration of the hair grooming toolset which is an order of magnitude faster and endowed with Vellum physics brushes for fast, realistic combing.
MUSCLES | T-REX
The muscle, tissue and skin simulation system leverages the power and speed of the Vellum solver, and combines it with interactive SOP-level tools to prepare the system for simulation.
Muscles | Interactive Workflow
Attach muscles to motion captured clips then define the tissue and skin at varied levels of tightness. The pipeline includes importing muscle geometry that is converted into tet-meshes, groom the muscle fibers, import animated bone geometry, draw muscle tension lines, animate muscle tension, then simulate the whole solution using Vellum.
Groom | Guide Hairs
The new Guide Groom workflow provides a more interactive artist-driven experience for grooming your characters and creatures. Sparsely lay down guide hairs to define the general direction and length of the hair then use the Plant tool to start filling out the hairs based on those guides. Scatter mode can populate the hair much faster in response to the guides. You can then move, delete or cull the hairs to sculpt the results.
Groom | Physics Brush
Guide Groom also allows for physics to play a role in placing the hair. This works well with longer hair especially when defining how it interacts with the character's body. At any point you can kick into a live simulation to let the hairs rest properly. Puff up the hair then use the brush workflow to sculpt the character's hair style.
HAIR | KARMA RENDER
The new Hair shader works with both Karma CPU and XPU. Karma XPU offers fast render times to evaluate your grooms while Karma CPU offers a full feature set for final renders.
