Houdini 20.5 Shelf tools

Generate Hair Cards shelf tool

Converts dense hair curves to a polygon card, keeping the style and shape of the groom.

On this page

Overview

This tool allows you to convert hair or fur into polygon cards, while keeping the style and shape of the groom. These polygon cards require far less memory and less computational power to render and display than dense hair curves, which makes them useful for realtime applications.

The Hair Card Generate node assigns groups of nearby curves to clusters and generates polygon cards for each cluster, with the width and orientation matching the original curves.

Note

You can use this tool without having any initial hair generated. You can simply groom the guides and create hair cards directly from the guides.

Once you generate the hair cards, you can use the Hair Card Texture tool to generate the textures.

Generate Hair Cards

  1. Click the Generate Hair Cards tool on the Hair Utils tab.

  2. Select the hair or groom objects you want to generate hair cards for and press Enter.

Once the hair cards are applied to the object, you can use the parameters on the Hair Card Generate node to make modifications.

Tip

You can manually sculpt the geometry of the hair by diving inside the Hair Generate node and manually moving the verticies to create a desired look with regular modeling tools.

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