Ben Toogoood

We found using both a karmaMaterialBuilder and a usdMaterialXbuilder fed in to a collect node allows for setting up simplified preview materials in 20.5

Something along these lines:

Just for anyone landing on this thread in the future: yes, it is possible to use a modified version of the hair_deform.bgeo.sc which comes with the Hair Procedural to deform arbitrary geometry, and I've attached a copy of the custom file we ended up with to this post. It's worked for our purposes so far - fingers crossed it's helpful to someone else down the line. Feel free to give it a whirl.

cheers

Thanks Goldleaf - I'll take a look and see if we can bodge our way there.

If it helps for future idea/plans, our specific use-case is deforming costume pieces composed of many curves (woven cloth, knitted wool, fuzzy felt) etc where it's not feasible to cache them directly from the rig.

The 'Arbitrary Geometry' mode in SOPs land GuideDeform does the job - it'd just be a fantastic streamliner to have it happen as a render time procedural.

Many thanks
Ben