I think we have to talk about Houdini... :)
TheMysteryIsThePoint
Posts: 2,958
I fiddled for literally a week to unsuccessfully get long hair simulation to work in Blender, and this after deciding that dForce hair using the cloth engine just doesn't look real. I worked with a guy from upwork.com to write a tool that would take the hair data exported by Sagan (but it will probably work with any of the converters, subject to a limitation) and import it into Houdini.
Houdini just worked. No fiddling. I just pressed a button. Granted, the tool sets things up, but the sim is extremely stable with no collision distance and other silliness to speak of.
How it works is a bit complicated because of something similar to what @wolf359 pointed out to me about MDD: Blender wants to hold all the vertex data in memory. So Houdini tool outputs a bunch of binary data, and a script is run in Blender to, at every frame, read in the vertex data for that frame and adjust the hair appropriately. It works perfectly frame by frame, but when I hit ctrl-F12 to render an animation, the script fails and sometimes it crashes Blender. So I wrote another script to render it frame by frame. That seemed to work, but is not optimal. This approach is also better because by not exporting the hair as Alembic, it should work with the FREE version of Houdini.
In any case, I am beginning to realize that God knows I love Blender, but it is not nearly the best tool for every job. MD does cloth far, far better. Houdini does sim, far, far better.
The limitation I mentioned earlier is that I haven't figured out how to set up a particle system with strands of varying length, via Python. But that's just a matter of time and we can work together to get other conversion tools to export hair in the simple format that the Houdini tool wants, and have Blender import the results. @Cinus @ThomasLarsson
I am now beginning to see the strengths of the Alembic format. Every tool just seems to import it without any problems whatsoever and now, for me, it's seemlessly tying together Daz Studio for the character, Marvelous Designer for cloth sim, Houdini for hair sim, and Blender for everything else.
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Comments
Wow that looks great! I didn't even realize Houdini did this, I thought it was for SFX like explosions and such.
that is very sexy and I at least think I am straight
It does everything. I live in Los Angeles, probably the best place in the world if you're trying to get a handle on animation because all the users' groups for any application you can imagine have a chapter here. The Houdini user group meets (at least used to) on the campus of USC. As a Bruin, I can swallow just enough of my pride to go :) There was a presentation on the making of the Diablo IV trailer and it really opened my eyes on how crazy powerful Houdini is. They explained in great detail how they produced many of the effects. That's why I'm so excited about the Everything Nodes effort in Blender, even as I know nothing about it.
And then, there's the fact that with version 18.5 they've focused on character animation, including a dead simple method to retarget mocap to arbitrary armatures, like Motionbuilder is famous for. And they've promised that more is to come.
I think Houdini is harder to grasp than Blender as Blender is harder to grasp than DS, but the benefit is undeniable. I hope there's a Houdini donut tutorial :)
Haha, I fell in love with it when I saw it in the store. G8's sure deform nicely, don't they?
I had been looking because I need something like this for a scene, but this one had more of that sinuous rotation and dipping of the shoulders at the end that none of the others I found anywhere had. Now at least I have a video to tell a dancer what I want, and a PN Studio should capture that nicely. And with Houdini 18.5, it should even be easier to retarget. I just have to figure out how :)
Sigh, I just left LA in August after 9 years due to the pandemic, I moved back home for the time being because I couldn't afford the 2K a month rent lol. And then you don't pay it and you say it out loud and you're like wait, when did 2K for a studio ever actually become acceptable? But yeah, a friend of mine years ago used to go to a group for Nuke users. I do miss that city and all the opportunities it had. This pandemic will be over one day and I can make my way back. Sometimes it's hard to swallow your pride, but then you look at what you can gain and it's easier to suck it up lol. I'm totally going to look into Houdini if it's that powerful. A lot of these programs I can pick up pretty quick if I sit down and know what I'm looking for and what I want to do since I've been using all sorts of different things for twenty years, it's when you turn it on with no direction that you get lost lol. But a donut tutorial for Houdini would be the best!
Blender is an amazing tool, but it's definitely not the best of the best for most things. I've found that it's the best tool at being pretty darn good at most things into one convenient product. Houdini is probably the most powerful software out there right now. I know with the last C4D update, a lot of unhappy users started looking into a combination of Blender + Houdini since that combo covers so much ground. I spent a week playing with liquid sims in Houdini and was blown away at how fast the sims are, not to mention the endless possibilities that my mind could barely grasp.
By the way, that's a great looking demo video you posted. Good work!
Houdini is definitely very powerful, and has probably the best cloth simulations outside of MD as well, but there's a fairly steep learning curve to it, and it's not for the faint of hardware.
Wow. I may have to put some of my tax return into a license this year. Did you have to have Houdini Engine to make that work? I notice Houdini Core and Houdini FX have perpetual license options, but Engine only has rental.
@SickleYield
Just Houdini Indie. And that, only because the first version exported the hair via Alembic, which Apprentice doesn't support. But the current version which outputs binary vertex data for Blender to read in probably would have worked with the free Apprentice.
It's my understanding that Indie has the combined functionality of Core and FX, but is rental only. And Engine is a suite of plugins for other software to integrate Houdini functionality.
Thanks. Ever so slowly I am resolving my technical problems, and maybe in ten years I'll get to actually make a movie :)
And my impressions echo yours... what little I've been able to work out (with help) has already made it worth the effort and its flexibility is a huge tease... much like with Blender's node system, the biggest problem is a lack of creativity on my part to realize what I could already do if I just would "get it". Pearls before swine, in a sense :)
I recently picked houdini back up again lol. If you ever make a tool like diffeo for houdini be sure to share it :P
I'm afraid you'll have to talk to Thomas on that one :)
But I've found that Alembic works flawlessly to get assets in/out.
The retargeting tool I had a guy on upwork.com write for Houdini. Could not be easier to use.
https://youtu.be/CIyn0jmtJPc
Good things are coming, guys.
When the digital animated movie "Final Fantasy" came out 20 years ago, the end credits listed a team of about ten people who were credited with modeling and animating the protagonist's hair (which was a short, straight bob). They literally had a ten-person team working full time to make the hair for just one character look more or less real.
They actually did a pretty good job. Aki's about Victoria 3-level, but her hair and facial animations still look pretty good. But they needed ten professionals and who knows how many hours of computing time on high-end machines to make it happen. Two decades on, one (very talented) person with a consumer PC can turn out animations using off-the-shelf tools with a level of realism that blows away anything they could do then.
We're not out of the Uncanny Valley yet. We're so attuned to the way that things -- especially people -- move in the real world that even in an animation as spectacular as the one @TheMysteryIsThePoint posted above, we can still notice details that aren't quite right (for me it was one lock of hair that moves as a unit rather than individual strands). But damn, the technology has come a long way.
@wolf359
I think it should. The hair tool didn't, but that was only because it was outputting Alembic, which Apprentice is crippled not to do. But this tool just writes a JSON file to be imported into DS.
I'm still testing, but I have not found any problems, and then I'll share it. I assume Alex could also add support for importing other mocap sources (since I couldn't get the GPUs I wanted, I picked up an XSens Awinda, and Alex added support for $50), as well as other target armatures.
So far, it has handled everything I've thrown at it. This tool was 100% Alex, but I REALLY need to learn more Houdini; 18.5 is particularly amazing because of the character stuff they added.
Houdini is nuts lol. I worked for like a week on one stupid fluid sim lol. Still ended up lumpy looking for some reason, but I said screw it and moved on lol. Most of the time was making caches really. Tweak a setting, rechache the flip, then recache the mesh. Rinse repeat. I think I might need a better CPU for this, 2700x isn't cutting it. Thinking of getting a mobo upgrade to a 570, then toss in a better CPU. Will have to wait and see what my paycheck looks like I guess.
The tool Alexander Goryun at Upwork is writing for me is coming along. There are some issues with extreme rotations that I'm hoping quaternions will resolve and hand this over to anyone that wants it. I think it will work even with Houdini apprentice, which is free.
Phaedra Strut
Keep in mind that this animation (ActorCore Heroine Strut) was retargeted in Houdini with basically zero characterization, just import a single frame BVH of the target character, import the source FBX, and away you go.
This render has the skirt simulated in DS, that's why it's janked up between the model's thighs, and the dForce Curly hair is the polygonal model simmed in DS as well because I forgot to export the subd cage to simulate the hair in Houdini. I just wanted to show this amazing tool that Alex wrote and how well it works 99% of the time.
There is just a bit of foot sliding, but that should be easy to fix or hide from the camera.
Those material conversions are looking reaaaaaaaaallly nice from what I can see.
Thank you. The skin was just me messing around with the texture maps exported with Sagan, the rest is courtesy of Mr. Larsson and Mr. Padovani. Not a day goes by where I am not grateful to either of them.
Hi folks! For anyone interested in using DAZ content in Houdini, check out this new thread in which I've posted some initial experiments with generating DAZ library content directly in Houdini.
- Dave
@TheMysteryIsThePoint how is the tool coming along? really looking forward for daz to houdini stuffs
There seems to be a wierd problem with it. Alex says it is SideFx's fault and not Daz's, but in some cases the rotations come out all wrong. I have not tried it with the newly minted Houdini 19 yet, but I'll get around to that, soon. We should both keep our fingers crossed because that would be beyond awesome if it worked perfectly for all inputs.
BTW, the latest version of the tool, which should be done in a couple of weeks, should also support Optitrak armatures.
good news indeed. looking forward for the tool hopefully itll work perfectly. @TheMysteryIsThePoint is the tool for this conversion available for public download anywhere? i would purchase if its for sale
@videoninja719
Right now, when it works, it's excellent, but when it doesn't, it's nightmare fuel. I haven't been able to deduce what triggers the bug; I thought it was extreme rotations, but it only seems to happen on a G8's right arm.
I have no problem releasing it as-is under some Open Source license, like Sagan. More than anyone's money, I'm interested in an engaged community to help with it's development. That hasn't really happened with Sagan, but, who knows...
I believe right now there are some things that are specific to my setup in it, and so Alex will have to change those so that it's suitable for anyone's computer. It should be just a couple of weeks. I really have to learn Houdini better so that I can support it myself and leave the heavy lifting to Alex.
Thank you for the tips. Good luck to you both and success all the way. i m still new to houdini myself..