Hello, I'm a student and fairly new to Houdini. I started trying to learn it last year. I'm trying to use it for dynamic/simulated fur, and I have a groom I'm happy with, but I feel like before simulating the fur there has to be a way to have my groom cook before simming, instead of recooking the whole node network each time. I have tried going through and locking my nodes, but for some reason my animated alembic file disconnects from the guide curves when I do that. I also don't seem to be able to disconnect the hair gen node and reconnect it and get the same result, which is odd to me? I noticed this because I disconnected it from my guide groom to try to connect it to the guide deform, but after having trouble with the sim, I tried to reconnect it to the guide groom, and it wasn't at all similar. I went back to an older filer iteration so it's fine, but shouldn't something node based like that be able to do that without trouble?

I'm sure there's some basic thing I'm missing or not familiar with, but it can be hard to know what information to search for when you have no idea at all. I have watched some of the fur videos (like the 16 hair and fur masterclass, and parts of the 16.5 hair and fur masterclass, other smaller videos). I tend to learn better from documentation and trying things out myself, but Houdini's help file is a little bare, so here I am.

When I try to sim my fur it takes forever, and I think because it's cooking through all the math of my merged grooms and such every time. Is there a way to bake the final groom result or something before simming so it has less to figure out? Or does fur take forever to sim no matter what?

See the ‘File Cache’ tab on the Guide Groom node to save your groom to disk. The guide simulate has a similar ‘Caching’ tab for saving the resulting simulated guides to disk.

Thank you so much!

nice otter!

Thank you McNistor! He's simming now and everything is going much smoother

Show us then.