Houdini 20.5 Shelf tools

Granular Strand shelf tool

Fills grains along the edges of polygons, creating a beaded wire effect.

On this page

Overview

Note

This tool is a technical demo of alternate uses for the POP Grains tool.

This tool fills grains along the edges of polygons, creating a beaded wire effect. Similar to the Granular Sheet tool, the particles are densely packed to give some bend resistance. The particles are evenly spaced and very tightly constrained. This could be used for creating things like stacked necklaces, nets, or chains.

This tool can be thought of as a simple wire solver. It results in wire-like behavior because there are no collisions between particles since they are all right next to each other and constrained. An advantage of using this tool for simple strand simulations is that it’s very stable and faster in certain instances.

Tip

To pin a PBD simulation, make sure you set the mass of the particles to 0.

Using Granular Strand

  1. Select the object to convert to a Granular Strand.

  2. Click the Granular Strand tool on the Grains tab.

For specific parameter information, see the POP Grains help.

Note

There is no twist when using this tool, unlike the wire solver can do with hair.

Shelf tools

Using the shelf

  • Customize the shelf

    How to change the look of the shelf, change and rearrange its contents, and create your own shelf tools.

Technical