A growing collection of digital assets what might be helpful to a beginning Houdini artist. Every tool does a simple operations what is usually very common.
General purpose nodes:
- Positional Change: takes original and deformed geometry, and adds a v@pchange with a difference between positions on these geos; contains a visualization option and a mix slider.
- Calcualte Curve U: fastest way to create @curve_u attribute, also can convert from @uv in order to save a little bit of memory.
- Calcualte Curve Tangent: better way to calculate tangent — every point points at the next one, and the end point of every curve continues the direction instead of breaking; additional randomization of the end point vectors (on set angle) and @end attribute to easily separate last points on the curve.
- Curve Root: creates @root attribute (or a group "roots") in the very first point of every curve; has an option of leaving only root points.
- Curve Rotate: (useful for grass and hair) rotates a curve (by @root point) to a specufied angle with option to add randomization.
Simulational:
- Optimize Smoke Fields: takes volume primitives from a smoke simulation, converts to VDBs, merges multiple scalar fields into vector field, deactivates voxels beyound bounaries of @density with option to downsample any of them.
Hair and Fur:
- Fur Vusualizer: colorizes hair randomly, also appliying unified color onth hairs in one clump on top; has an additional option to color guard hair with different color.
- Hair Clump Radius Randomize: just sets a random attribute @clumpsize on guide hair.
- Guide Influence Radius: helps then guides on the skin were planted with different density, so it calculates @influenceradiusscale attribute on order to set in influence individually in order to limit interpolation from destroying fine ditails.
- Hair Clump Anisotropy: takes @anisotropy_dir skin attribute and moves clumped hair in it's direction in order to make it look similarly to wolf's mane.
Hair-related tools are based on algorithms by Alex Sknarin.