Hello,
just wanted to share the Houdini variance of ICE 'Deform by UV' [si-community.com] compounds. Thing rides on common simple trick, what could be done by shuffling the original point position, when it is projected and deformed through some UV space. Anyway I think it's still interesting, look like simple example of Houdini way to get functionality of ICE's workhorse, ‘Get Closest Location’ and ICE “interpreting” of location concept.
I've used a little bit extended version of these ICE compounds, for simple skin sliding on character, anyway I think it's mainly used for stuff like in pic. It allows to model in much more comfortable, “planar” space, also it is much easier to adapt things like modeled cloth, to different body.
Good news is, performance when editing mesh, seems to be the same in Houdini, if not faster than in Softimage.
Bad news (if this is a news at all) - something definitively is wrong with *obj export on SI - Houdini relation. Win 7 Sp1 runs over all memory, with Houdini, with 20k meshes, smooth shaded. I'd believe this is related to point normals, written into *obj by SI. Passed the *obj files through Blender, which elegantly omits to write any point normal into *obj file, everything become fine after that.
Get hiplc here [matkovic.com]