Houdini 20.5 Nodes Geometry nodes

Volume Rasterize Hair geometry node

Converts fur or hair to a volume for rendering.

Since 13.5

This SOP will take curve geometry and convert it to a VDB volume suitable for rendering. Curves will first be converted to a point cloud by resampling, which are then rasterized to the resulting volume. The volume can contain the average hair tangent vector in the tangentu field which can be used in instead of dPdt in hair shaders.

Using VDB volumes to render hair can speed up rendering of background characters with hair, since it avoids the time and memory overhead of rendering curves directly. It can also be used to implement a global illumination system for hair, which would otherwise be very expensive or noisy due the low probability involved in point sampling hair strands.

Parameters

Voxel Size

Size of the voxels in the created volumes.

Filter

The filter shape that to use when splatting particles. The gaussian filter will produce smooth blobs and is useful for larger particles. When the particle size is smaller than the voxel size, a box filter will produce a similar result in less time, so is the default as this is usally the case for hair.

Sampling Quality

Controls the resampling point density when converting curves to points. The default of 1 will create points along the curve with spacing approximately equal to the voxel size. Larger value for the sampling quality will decrease the point spacing, improving accuracy.

Density Scale

Scales the values in the resulting density volume by a constant factor.

Width Scale

Scales the width of the rasterized curves.

Color Shop Path

Specifies a CVEX shader to be applied after resampling to create or modify attributes on the resampled points. The shader may use the curveu float parameter to determine the parametric position on the curve - for example to evaluate a color ramp.

Primitives per Batch

To avoid excessive memory use for the temporary resample points, this parameter limits the number of primitives that are resampled and rasterized at a time. Internally, a ForEach SOP iterates over each batch.

Rasterize Tangent

A volume containing the average hair tangent vector will be created when enabled.

Tangent Voxel Scale

Specify a scale on the voxel size for the generated tangentu field.

Tangent Filter Width

Controls the minimum filter width to use when choosing a tangent vector for rendering.

Note

When filtering, the tangentu field isn’t averaged like density, color or other attributes. This ensures that the tangent vectors are not blended together, which could produce new invalid tangent vectors that didn’t exist in the original curves. Instead, the rasterization algorithm preserves the original tangents by randomly selecting a single tangent vector for each voxel. In mantra, these tangents are randomly sampled to find a plausible tangent vector in the neighborhood of each shading point. This parameter controls the search radius used by mantra to find these candidate tangent vectors.

In general, larger values will reduce noise but increase blurring of the tangent field while smaller values will be sharper but will render with voxel grid noise. The default of 4 will allow 4^3 or 64 candidate samples which will usually render with little noise.

Color Voxel Scale

Specify a scale on the voxel size for the generated Cd field, if there is a Cd point attribute on the input geometry

Velocity Blur Type

Controls the way the velocity attribute v is treated during rasterization.

No Velocity Blur

Disable velocity blur

Velocity Field

Create a VDB vector field for the velocity and rasterize the particle v values into this field. This option will generally result in correct occlusion when rendering the volume with nearby surfaces, but it can produce incorrect results when nearby curves have different velocities.

Rasterize Velocity Blur

Bake the velocity blur into the generated volume by averaging along the motion path. This option will produce more consistent motion blur when nearby curves have different velocities but can lead to incorrect occlusion.

Velocity Voxel Scale

Specify a scale on the voxel size for the generated v field, if there is a v point attribute on the input geometry.

Shutter

The shutter time to use for velocity blur rasterization.

Shutter Offset

The shutter offset to use for velocity blur rasterization.

Blur Samples

The number of motion blur samples to use for velocity blur rasterization. Larger numbers of samples will produce smoother and more accurate results but will take more time to compute.

See also

Geometry nodes