Hello. I'm really new to Houdini and I picked up apprentice to see if I can use it to replace Maya and Xgen for making hair for my projects.So far it looks pretty good. The detail that can be achieved with the hair system looks really nice, but I can't seem to get as much control over the guides as I want. I've been looking through the docs and tutorials to see if there is a way to individually manipulate the guides, either through selection or a masking brush similar to Xgen IGS, but I can't seem to find anything.

I've also been looking into using curves generated from an external program as guides in the hair system. I saw this tutorial [vimeo.com] which does just that, but it looks like it uses an older fur system. Is there any way to add external guides into the newer hair system? Thanks!

hi julian
create your guides, in the guide groom node, basic tab, switch from scatter to external geo and pick your imported curves
ciao j

Thanks! That worked. Going to try a test groom and see how well it works.

Hi, I'm back with more noob questions. I've been playing around with the guide curves I brought in from Blender and I'm trying to modify them further in Houdini. The hairstyle I'm trying to achieve has a lot of layered clumps so I have to be careful with how I place and adjust my guides and can't just take a screen brush to the whole thing. Is there no way to use the brushes on just the selected guides? I've been using visibility and edit nodes to modify isolated guides, but it's a bit tedious.

Oh, and another thing. Around how many guides is ideal for Houdini's hair system? I'm more used to XGen which uses a small amount of guides and I'm not sure if I have too many at the moment. Does Houdini have an equivalent to XGen's region maps or is parting handled by just having more guides?

Thanks!

hi,

to comp individual guides or renderhairs, jump into your guidegroom, press s, (selection mode) select your guides, (turn orange) and use your guidebrushes.

about regionmaps….as far as I know, there is no regionmap,the partingbrush could help, you can paint tons of maps if you set your attributes from no override to skinattribute.

how many guides you need? maybe some more advanced user can help,I´m houdini noob too

maybe check this link https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/grooming-and-rendering-realistic-hair/ [www.sidefx.com]

ciao j

Thanks for the help! I thought the guides weren't being selected because they weren't highlighted, so I thought it wasn't doing anything. Apparently there is no visual feedback as to which guides are currently selected when high quality lighting mode is turned on. Switched to regular lighting and now everything works as I hoped it would, which is great. Time to groom.