Hello all,

I'm new to Houdini and recently completed a subnetwork for a project that allows me to create DNA helixes from a resampled input curve.



I want to animate these, but moving the input curve will cause the network to continuously resample and change the DNA strand.

SO, I'm trying to create the geometry and then deform it with Wire Capture and Wire Deform nodes. I think I have the basic setup, but I can't get anything close to decent deformation.

I think there are two main problems: 1) the pinching of the overall shape in the center of the curve, obvious in this cylinder example, and



2) the mis-alignment and disorderliness of the separate parts of my DNA pieces as the curve continues. The different piece parts seem to be deforming differently from each other.



Is there a good resource explaining Wire Deform? The official documentation didn't help me that much. Am I going about this completely the wrong way? I was kind of expecting Wire Deform to work sort of like Maya's Curve Warp. Is it possible to have it work like that?

Thanks a bunch.

Hi,

in the path: /obj/DNA_Strand_half/DNA/nucleotide -> change primitive type of the tube from primitive to poylgon.
This gives me better results.
Recently I've created an experimental wire deformer by myself, which gives me more control over the falloff curves etc… and the abililty to shift the geometry along the target curve.
If this helps you, you can use it.

Using a point deform node seems to give pretty good results.

Wow, thank you both!

@Aizatulin— You're right. Changing the nucleotide tube from to polygons makes a huge difference. At one point I was looking for ways to unify the geometry, but I wasn't sure what that would be beyond a Merge node. I have a basic idea of what Houdini considers Primitives, but don't understand it to point where I understand how it's treating them differently in this case.

@mrCatfish— It looks great! I'd seen people talking about pointDeform but I was never sure if it would work for me and I didn't see any clear examples so I didn't follow up. Side note, I made my helix by first sweeping a circle along a curve except I didn't know there was a sweep node. So thanks!