How to Groom Hair & Fur in Houdini | Arnold

as easter is now around the corner i thought why not create something which is more to the topic or to the theme so i have this lying around which is a little bunny rabbit and i thought we can do some kind of grooming today and we will do doing that in houdini so go check it out [Applause] hello everyone and welcome along to another episode i'll be showing you how to set up some grooming and this time we don't do it in maya xgen we'll be working in houdini and their grooming tools so what we do is we will use the like i have a model prepared i modeled that on my own uh it's not the best as you know i'm not a modeler but i think it will do its purpose um then we will bring that into houdini and we will apply the grooming on it we do some rougher groom for the bigger fur patches and then we do the fine detail on the ears as well so we're working mostly on the face here and then on the inside of the ears so that is the goal and you can follow along and if you accessed my patreon membership to get the source files the full model and the houdini hip files will be included and the same applies to my youtube membership if you want to sign up you can check the join button below and you can be part of my youtube team and you you get the same privileges as on patreon as well and also what i before we jump in i have a pretty active discord channel with lots of 3d guys on it look dev compass effects artists so we are growing a little community over there and you will be able to join with the link below in the description and it would be great to see you over there as well so without further ado let's jump into houdini and get started all right before we fully jump into this i just wanted to open up my final project file so this is what we will be creating you can see it's a very nice detailed headroom it has some thicker braids in here which replicate my reference bunny here and then we've got the super fine groom around the ears which gives you a nice fluffy look to it um so yeah i think we will be starting from scratch it's you can see it's nothing crazy going on it's just like quite a few like simple groom setups here and then my main geometry so i'll be starting from scratch so let's just hit ctrl n for a new scene and let's bring in the alembic file and i like to do that from scratch so you guys can follow along step by step so first let's load in the bunny geometry this is what it is it's a skinny bunny rabbit i tried to replicate this guy so it's it's obviously not perfect but it i think it suits the purpose what i want to do is unpack this first so we have access to the the polygons and all that data um hook that up and then i want to convert that i'm not sure if this step is needed but i always tend to do that and then we just create a null for our output so this is the file we'll be working with right so this is the first steps we want to do and we can jump right into the whole process and i'll be just um i think we will be just focusing on the thicker parts first which is um this longer groom here on this forehead and snout area so let's just call this um geo bunny here and then i'll create a i select my object here and in the grooming shelf i choose generate guides which should um populate me the right nodes there we go so now you can see we've got the groom everywhere what i want to do though is i want to paint some masks on it so it's only in the locations that i needed to be in and to do so um on top level here i can click on scatter on surface and the density here i can choose this to be a skin attribute which will open up the density slot and i will i just want to call it density long braid and then i'll just create that hit that paint button here um it will complain i think that's just a bug in here but it should have created this kind of thing on the skin and and i'll just need to connect that up to there and let's see if everything is named properly all everything looks like it's set up the right way so if i now paint in here and i do i can flood it to be um let's see yeah so we have a value here and the default value is one we want to have it zero so there's no hair and then in here you can see we have something um what i want to do is change my um overrides from um ramped attribute to attribute as is so i can just i can see what i got actually let's keep it as ramp that maybe just do a grayscale maybe yeah well the purpose is here to actually see if there's something on it or not and i think this is pretty cool so we can we can see blue there's no hair and red will have the groom i'm also using a wacom tablet here which just gives me some more control on on painting so what i want to do now is just paint out the main areas of the fur like these guys [Laughter] and if we go up a level you can see we have the density being applied and now we should just be able to scatter more and more hair if we need it this is just our guide geometry though so keep that in mind this is not the hair itself this will just be to control the main shaping of or the flow of the of the hair here all right so now let's jump into our grooming here let's just reduce the density for now it's a bit much let's just try maybe 50 just to get our initial shaping going on and we definitely don't want anything on the eyes right so before that we need to make sure that we do not paint on the eyes and actually i want to remove them from from our grooming selection so i just hit s double click here to select this whole eye and double click on this guy to select this and just hit delete which will create a blast node which will remove this here and then we can go back to painting and then we don't generate the paint on there which is perfect and now this is what we have and what i want to do now is just kind of get some chaos some randomization in here so in my grooming context what i first want to do is do a do a curved vect here which will help me to just paint on the mesh to to get some direction on it so just some rough drawing on here so whenever i draw let's say like this you can see that the the curves follow my my painting direction and maybe some go over to the left here and then most of them just go in the front and then it creates automatically these kind of part partings and and splicing and whatnot we can do one to the side here it's just it just helps to to sell the flow of the of the surface and then in in this volume velocity from curves you can adjust the surface lift so we can just lift them up again slightly like that they should not be lying on on the head just so much but after that you can also just create another lift now let's just move this out of the way and there should be lift guides which will kind of do the same thing you can just randomize the lift which is a bit nicer so some are lying down and some are lifted fully upwards like this right and this is the first part of that and the next would be to set the length actually and i think we should set the length in here there's a guide length node we just drag it out here and plug it in the middle and as a mode i want to do multiply and then i also want to do randomize so i can actually make some longer and some shorter so this gives me even more randomization so we lift them up again now you can see they are all scattered a bit more which is fairly cool and i think the length is not long enough right now so let's just extend this even further something like that okay and then the next part would be to groom them somehow or just add some variation to them so what i always like to do is just add some frizziness to them and on defaults uh we don't have so many uh points on them for a nice detailed frizz so what you can do you go up one level and in the in here the guides i think you can add more segments to this so let's just try 20 which should give us way more points on on the guides which will help to get more detail so go back into the context and now you can see already we get way more detailed frizziness on them you can't change the frequency because they are not really curled up they i just want to give them some kind of like lateral flow maybe this is even still too much we can increase the amplitude somewhat like that and then we we still want to reduce the frequency so it's more like a really subtle almost like a bend like that which seems to be working very well and we can see we need to groom these guys downwards so then we can just use some kind of surface brushes to just groom them slightly so we want these guys um did i oh i need a screen brush there we go and i just want to i don't know move them downwards so they're actually facing into into the camera a bit like that so they're pretty much these guys are just almost straightforward like you can see it's in here even some are going um going downwards like this and this is pretty much the part of grooming so you just you have your reference and you just try to follow the the look of that like by grooming just moving the curves and you can see they go over the hair and we will paint more density everywhere else just to get a better read but but for now this is what we have um set length i just want to also make them longer and uh so yeah i just have to select a guy groom note and then we can do the adjustment you can see now how they get shorter and we want to adjust the length and we want to make sure that the target length is maybe three so this is the longest i could get which is a bit long so let's try two and this works i think so we can just increase the radius reduce the strength and then just slightly paint over here so we have a bit longer here in the front like that you can see now these are a bit longer which is great and this is more or less roughly the look and then in the all the way towards the end i want to do a clump guides which will actually clump them together like this obviously we do not want to go that extreme we just want very subtly those those clamps but for this to work we need a bit more density in here so on the guides up top i'll just increase the density to 150 and then for this to work we need to recache our guide room here and then we should get more density there we go so definitely more density uh let's see the clumping working now okay we can see we've got some clumps here three more or less three are clumped together which is great and what we want to do is um i just want to increase this first so we can actually see what's happening and i want to adjust the width scale so we get a bit thinner um clumps in general and then we want to stray so a few hairs just go away like fly off definitely we need to adjust the scale we want smaller clumps not so big ones like this so we just have a few thinner ones in here let's just first save this to our capture scene file all right so now we have a few hairs clumped together and we will do the main clumping actually on the bigger bigger on the actually on the hairs i mean we just want some kind of clumping to just get a general like some because you can see in here some are actually clumped together all right so then if we have this set up now so let's see actually how it looks if we add some hair so i'm selecting the groove and then on the left i do generate hair which will do that so now if i hide my group my guides this is what we got and you can see there's lots of weird things going on like this here is not nice so we need to adjust a few parameters so on the hair itself the first thing is the influence radius and the larger this is the more it looks for other clumps and it generates curves so i just want to reduce that number here and you can see by just reducing this we got less less hair you can see how it spreads out and we if we reduce it it just generates hair around its guides essentially like that and we want that we don't want to go too crazy and you can see with the clumping now these these fibers are clumped together super dense but my thickness is very thick for each hair strand so i want to have thicker uh sorry thinner hair maybe like this but then a lot more so they are clumped together and also these fabricated fake hair they do not have like a tip pretty much they are cut off in the top so i just want to remove this guy and move my profile of the curve over so it's tapering only to the top here you can see now they are not tapering as much they are tapering slightly but not too much like this all right so now what we want to do is we want to generate a bit more hair so let's just go in here general and let's try maybe 500. and now we've got 500 hairs in here you can see they are still clumped together like soup going super tight towards the top and that's because of the clump in here you can see if i don't have that they are spread out quite a lot and the reason is that i have this tightness parameter here and i also have um where is that the width scale so if i reduce that the hair should go even thinner but the most most uh apparent value is this tightness so you can see if i reduce the tightness they are not clumped together as much and we don't want that we we want more like these thicker almost braids i would call them like this right so we get these bigger chunks of hair you can see there's quite a few now clumped together uh we might have a bit many guide curves but i still think it might just work our profile right now is clumping um from the center downwards and what's happening right now actually is the hair is being clumped by the guides right so the hairs are being clumped in here what i want to do though though is i want to clump them in in its own clump modifier so if i disable clumping there's there's nothing going on not much really and if i go into the hair now and i create clumps in here clump guides i can feed in the guides as my clump curves like that so now they are clumping with the guides and this gives me a bit more control i can add some curls to them if i need to obviously i don't want that for this guy but if you wanted to you can actually clump them so now you have some curly hair which it looks freaking cool i i think if you want to do some kind of curled hair this is the way to do it obviously the bunnies it doesn't have an afro whatever so we don't want curling but this is the idea so now we can see that we have some clumping going on um we have some control about the size i think using this parameter here so we don't have control about the clump size itself because it's clumping around the guides but we have the hair width scale and this enables us to actually um scale them to make the radius of each braid pretty thicker thinner we still have this profile here you can see that at the bottom it's thicker than it fades off towards the top and we don't want that we want it to be straight because this is almost straight so it might be a little tapered towards the bottom are towards the top but not as extreme as this is so everything like this works a bit better i think so we've got these thicker parts and i think this works a lot better and let's see i think our thickness is not thick enough and we want some strays and then what we also want to do is we want to create some flyaway hairs which like go like just single hairs going up flying away so there's like a guide mask thing which i want to create and in this tool you have the option to create a random mask and you can see now it's selecting 10 now it's all the hairs now it's like 10 of the hairs and we want to maybe do 20 of the hairs should like go crazy right so i'll just create another frizz in here create that guy hook it up like so and then in here i want to select a blend should be a guide attribute and it's mask and now it's applied by this attribute here i don't want to visualize the mask so there is an option to unhide this and i think in here as well and now if i boost up the frequency you can see only a few hairs are affected by this obviously it's way too extreme reduce the frizziness we don't want to go crazy and we don't want the amplitude to be that strong right so reduce the amplitude or just bring it in slightly like that you can see there is a few hairs now flying away and this should be a subtle effect as well it should not be too much like this maybe so if i disable the node you can see there's just some kind of more chaos it's a bit more broken up which is perfect and then what i want to do is i think we need to work on the clamps more and i don't feel super clumpy right now so in here we can work on we can just try to bring this in as well so we now have clumps within clumps and i think we also need to bring up the increase the thickness of the fur it's a bit thin in my opinion let's try 0.1 that's too much 0.05 this thing's still too much 0.25 and then we can reduce the amount of hair as well so let's just reduce this to 300 yeah i think this is coming along a lot better uh looking at this i'm not super happy yet with the look of this and i don't feel we see those isolated uh braids just yet so uh let's trick it somewhere in the in the gut and the hairs here and the hair gen the clumping um needs to get somewhere adjusted because you can see it's it's super thick still and if we reduce the clamp profile um it gets better we just need to tweak it some more like this and we also need to adjust the tightness so it's not super thick anymore something more like that and now you can see we get more of these these kind of thicker pieces thicker almost like tree stems or whatever so this seems to work a lot nicer so what i want to do now is we can try to curl them now a bit just to give them some kind of rotation and in the clump we still have the the curling option so let's introduce that um but not let's just not have it as tight like the frequency shouldn't be as as much and right now this is also applied from root to tip so we just wanted to have the same frequency and same amplitude um from root to tip we just want to reduce the frequency so now you can see what's happening right now this is almost turned off so we just slightly bring this in just to give some kind of really subtle rotation to them like that and now you can already see that they are they look more chaotic and more isolated i think uh sorry more um bent and and and clumped together like little stems or whatever and then what i want to do is i want to actually calm like groom it properly so let's first bring our stray hairs back like this and this so now you can see we still have our flyaway hairs due to the frizz we can push it even further if we need to like that we can reduce i increase the amplitude so we get more like chaotic hair in between and let's go up one level and now let's hide the hair and let's do some grooming so you can see that it pretty much has like a curve going over his head and then over the snout area so in the groom in here we can go into our groom guide room in here and we can do another screen brush and we only want to target pretty much the tops so we can check the full off i'm not sure if there's a way to only target the tips so we might just need to do this then so let's just move them over here like just comment slightly over and we also want to make sure that we don't have too much strength so it's only a subtle movement so we don't disturb it too much so now they're groomed towards the top these ones are groomed a bit downwards then we do a few to the side like this so there's some slight amount of direction in here now nothing too crazy but just some kind of randomized look i think so just something to break up the the overall shape okay i think now we can actually see nicely that there is some kind of direction especially on the top here they go to left these ones go to the right so this works fairly cool already i think for his uh top hair hey i hope you liked the video so far so we just finished with the hair on his on the front of his head we'll be painting some more density areas now around the ears and then we will jump on through the fur on on the on the ears as well um and i just wanted to say thank you guys for your continued support on my channel it really keeps growing and i really appreciate all the comments on discord on youtube on patreon it's really motivating me to just keep going and producing more content for you guys and if you guys like what i do as always please leave me a thumbs up and yeah let's continue grooming that little bunny all right so let's go back to the geometry and go to our paint node and let's just paint some more hair so we want to paint around these areas we want to make sure the snout i think it's called the snout snout area is free of hair increase the brush size and just paint some more hair yeah all right so let's head out and see how the density is being applied and i don't think you will see much because one caveat of using um these guide grooms um they have cached strokes in them so you would need to recatch the strokes to actually populate it with the with your latest uh painted maps it takes a little more time because you have way more density now i'm almost done there we go so now it's populated groom all over the place and it's working pretty good we need we have a few areas here on the nose area and on the ears which we need to groom as well and yeah let's just jump into that into the right guide room here do a surface brush screen brush and let's just do some more grooming let's increase our strength so it's more responsive clean out these areas around the snout like that so just getting always a bit closer and adding these kind of features which is in the reference obviously all right so this is now this we want to do something around the eyes but first we need to bring them back in right now i called them out right so there's no they blasted out of this bunny so what can we do we can just create a new stream in here so before the blast we go here uh we don't want to generate hair and i'm just copying this guy and i'm just doing the delete unselected so now we just have the eyes and we just create this guy and we just do out eyes like so and then we can essentially what we can do is just do another bunny and just call this bunny eyes and from here it's i guess there are way better ways to do this we just do an object merge and in the selection we just go to the bunny and select the eyes so now we have the eyes and the bunny and this should be here and then we should have both let's bring back this guy and now we have this so now we can just groom independently we can groom around this we can solve the intersection issues so we can just use a the surface brush here and just move the hair out of the way like this and you can also use a screen brush to just move all the hairs at once so it does not affect the roots so much just the whole thing so now we're just moving the the hair over aside from over the eyes like that and then we do the same on the other eye like this just free them up slightly so this would be the first idea and let's see if we bring back the clumps bring back the hair so now you can see how the eyes are more or less free we can obviously spend more time to just get the hairs better around it so obviously it's i'm just showing you the technique if you have some grooms to work on you would spend more time to make it look a lot nicer than what i'm doing here we've got one stray hair up there so let's just jump in here and just make sure that we get rid of this there's some must be some values in here let's see if this fixed that nope i think we can also just remove it i think it's cut gone all right so this is this part so now what i want to do next is work on the ear the hairs on the ears and the problem with those is you can see in the reference image here is that they are it almost looks like they are in a grid pattern you can see they are pretty straight and going like in a clean direction and normally if you scatter hair it just it scatters randomly around the surface so i found a little technique i'm not sure if it's um the best technique um but it worked for me and i think it worked well for for these kind of applications um and how it's done is i'm just raying a grid onto like a pretty much like a paper wrap around the ear and on that i'm generating the hair so let me show you how i do it i create a grid fairly basic like this and then i isolate the alembic and what i want to do first is i want to subdivide this guy like that all right so we can do maybe two iterations oh we need to do it on here there we go and then i wanna view through this and this and then i have my grid at the bottom here and i just wanna move it up so it's just going around the ear and i want to move it down and i just want to make it a bit like tilted so it's matching the orientation of the ear and then have it in front and maybe scale it on this and on this end and then we do a ray and i think it needs to be this way around and we need to reverse it and i think it's not the right direction that's better show the guide hide so you can see now it's being folded right and the reverse is on default off so nothing happens we just want to push it downwards and then we want to make sure we have more grids on here so let's just boost this number up you can see we're getting the ear shape here we can move it like that so now we have it fitting pretty well and we can see that we have this grid pattern which is what we wanted and we can just go and increase this maybe to 100 by 100 and then what we can do in the ray node we can create a point group ray hit group we can do a blast which is pretty much a delete based on an attribute and we can just blast that attribute and reverse it and now we just have the ear we copy our grid and ray and choose the yeah like that and then we just move the grid over to the other side we rotate it just to get the same thing on the other side pretty much like that and then we do select and we create the merge now we have these little ears so what we can do now create a new null out ears like that and we want to create a new geo node we just actually duplicate this one bunny ear go inside and just select the other one now we have the ears in here and i think what we have to do now is just generate the groom on this and let's try if this works create groom sorry great guides is what i wanted this guy enter and now we have the groom it's still everywhere what we want to do now is guide per point so now we have the guides on the points so now it's more or less in a linear row a nice row layout right and then we obviously don't want that visually in here i'm not sure why it's still there oh it's because it's in here that's the one we want okay and these are the guides obviously we need to do some kind of adjustments here we need to subdivide our main mesh as well so actually we can do we can do what can we do we want to blast it after i'll just do this the subdivide in here it's not the cleanest way but it's all right do we care yeah we care about the eyes as well okay all right so now we have this subdivided as well i just want to quickly test if our guides still work if i subdivided this now yep everything works still we've got our bunny and we've got this nice straight layout here for our ear hair all right so i think we need a lot more not a lot more but we need more grids to get a better detail on this which are in here so on the side grid one we just want them let's try 200 and 200 on the same on the other one two and two so now this is a bit more dense uh is it still doing what it's supposed to uh yeah it is it's obviously not aligning with the bunny geometry but it's still properly laid out so next thing is we want to do some kind of chaos and it's always good to do some kind of chaos so first thing is we want to create a set length which is always good you always want to randomize the crap out of your stuff so everything is random pretty much so you just want to go crazy on this obviously not too much but we want this for sure longer and shorter hair you can see in on the top here you can see definitely there is shorter and longer hair we want to have a clump like this and we want to have maybe even more guides we don't we want the profile to be not so much like this we want it to be more like shape like thick and then thin towards the tips like this and let's just actually go back into our geo here and now i'm actually getting lazy i'm just copying this parameter paste as a reference on here same for the other one we can actually paste it twice so what did i do paste as a reference and we paste it as a reference again so now we just have one slider let's try to 350. more hairs more guides just more and this looks a lot better i think go up go to the groom and let's just hide that's just not how i show all wireframe off and now you can see actually we have nice little clamps everywhere they're all still facing towards the camera what i want to do before we do the guide set length i want to create a curve effect like that which will mess up my little hierarchy here a bit delete the mirror node we don't want that because we don't have mirrored geometry and we want to unplug this shake it off shake it off and first do the advection so draw curve and let's just disable the guides yeah just view from there okay so i want to just create some kind of motion to this right so i want to draw around the top i want to draw around here draw around here so it's just for me to or just for the hair to have some kind of flow direction right it's it's not really random i'm just trying to i'm looking at this and i'm just seeing how it would be calmed like like brushed right so around the top of the ear and then these little channels that we can also i think hide the guide geometry so you can see it even better like this and then we can do one more like that so this is not now a nice flow we have and if i view if the guide on you can see they're all nicely brushed in that direction let's see they are they need to be lifted so i couldn't figure out a nice way to lift them within those two nodes from the curve effect so i just used the lift guides now and i think this works as well so the set lift i just use this and i randomize that and then we kind of get the look i wanted to have so we have these hairs lifted but we still have like a general groom direction and we can adjust it slightly so it's so it's lying down a slight amount but it's not too much something like this and then we still can reconnect our set length to create random length attributes on here and then we also want to clamp them back again so let's just do these two things and now we have it's more or less now in a pattern it's like you can see they are pretty much aligned and they go into this grid fashion in the clump we can adjust our clump size somewhat maybe go a bit lower 0.05 so now it's uh less obvious that they are clumped okay go maybe a bit more like this and reduce its tightness so it's not super tight at the tops somewhat but not too much we want some stray hairs so not every hair is being clumped in this uh clump as well and then we just go up a level and we select our groom our guides and we just say generate hair and then we have this nice fluffy hair on top of this what we still need to do is we need to increase the density so right now it's super low we can just double it more here we can even put it to 5 000 and now we're getting somewhere you can see now that we get these nice clumps and it's it's uh pretty cool we get these kind of chunky hairs which are still connected to each other um but you see these clumps which is very cool and if you don't like um exactly how much like if you don't like them too much you can still adjust those parameters somewhat you can also add some kind of frizziness to it but i would do that on the hairs itself so you just do a frizz guides in the hair group and then you're just freezing up all the hairs as well obviously this again is way too much uh we can reduce the frequency maybe to two so we just get minor adjustments and we can increase the amplitude so this is maybe a bit much so let's just try point one and we get this and these folds in here are just based on my geometry like if you smoothen out the geo a bit you get smoother look on for this part um let's just bring in the other hair and see how this looks i'm just a little bit um anxious about this line here we might need to adjust our ray let's see bringing this hair back we have a hole there and there so something got messed up it might have been due to the subdivisions we did earlier so let's just try to re-cache the strokes oh no my whole hair is broken now so we need to figure out what happened i think it's my paint so i think i messed up here so let's see what this looks blasting subdividing and then we add density yep yep yep this is it this is what i figured it happened so i'm not sure re-cash strokes we just need to recast them amazing beautiful so we want some more hair here for sure just that we fill in these little hair gaps we definitely want hair here oops uh shift and middle mouse drag changes to scale like this shift middle mouse click drag pretty much so now we have got lots more here and what i want to do um we can actually using more masks we can create a mask based on length so it's a guide mask like this and in here there should be an option to do a length mask and this will only target the longest pieces of hair so you can see now only the longer pieces are selected and i just want to randomize them and we can also use a random mask on top of that so it's now combining two masks so not all of these are frizzed up so let's just do a frizz uh it's fast that you click on the top there we go and we just want to use the blend mask of the guide attribute mask go into operations and boost this up so now we get more of this reduce the frequency again boost it up just creating some more chaos it's always good to just break things up all right so now we have this let's go up and view this all right so now we have this facial hair and this ear hair and now we just need to do this last piece which is um his little mouth section and i'll do this uh rather quick but first i want to clean up these guide hairs which should not be in his face there so in the guide groom i do a cut and i'm just cutting these hairs here all right and then we just do another on this guy we'll do another groom we can actually do add fur as well so now we have the hair um here come one hang so we've got these two guys and this would be the bunny geo bunny all right so again we do the same thing we just paint the density for this area and right now we have this already we just we can just copy it over and then we just rename the attributes right so we just hook these guys up and right now this is density long braid we just call it density short we can copy this parameter name and paste it in this and then this is all updated something like that all right so now let's just go out and view these guides and make sure that our override is to skin attribute and we want to set it to density short so now we just have the face area here boost up the density to maybe 25 um we can even go further let's try maybe 150 and then this should do it bring in these guides back so we now have both guides in place you can see now this fits pretty good we can just change the length to maybe one we go even further let's try this we want to have more segments let's try 20 and then we just want to do some some breakup so let's head back into the groom and we first want to create our random length so we do set length guide length and then we go change the mode to multiply once we get it and then we set it to multiply and we do random and we always want to make them a bit shorter uh like that we don't want to make them longer just shorter slightly so we get these random lengths here and then we just want to do some really rough um frizz again so go to first guides and we want to make the frequency low super low boost up the amplitude even lower just some really subtle movements and then we want to do some clumping guide clump and we already have a few clamps now i don't think it's super clumpy actually it's it's it's less clumpy than it is but we just want to have some some slight amount we reduce the tightness so we don't have too much going on at some stray rates yeah this is too much let's go back to point one and what else we we need to groom it some some bit so let's do a screen brush and we just want to give it some some direction obviously this brush is too strong we want a soft fall off angled round and then we just want to reduce the intensity and then we just want to slightly just add some kind of direction to this like we're down a bit yeah so this is pretty much like how you do this kind of like it's more clean right so now let's just go back up this is what we got right now and now if i bring back the hair for this we need to adjust this as well so right now again our clump um what is it called our influence radius is too large so we generate all these hair all the way outside of the of the guide so we just reduce this number you can see the lower it gets the more it will only create around the guides and we want it to only create around the guides not going not going too much if we need more hair we can increase the density so what we need to do is reduce the thickness maybe 2.015 less thicker hair we do the same thing with the tapering here move it over and this guy we move up like that and what else we want more let's try 400 so now we already have the same clumping right we don't want that so we need to increase our radius now like this and you can see if it's not too clumpy we don't have enough guides so i want to reduce this hair density and i'll just increase the guides to let's say 450 and then in here i need to recache them because i did some grooming on it all right now we have a lot more hair and now our clumping is again too aggressive so we need to reduce the clump size by maybe five less clumping going on go up this is now what we have and i think we still need a lot more hair so let's just bring this back up to 300 maybe there we go so now if i go into the guide and i disable the clumping we should have a lot more uniform here so the clumping disabled looks pretty uniform so if i bring that back we just need to adjust this it's it's too too strong i think so what we need to do is to tightness reduce that change the shape a bit and maybe we don't even want that maybe we don't even want clumping as much as i thought we would so um if i just disable the note all right so let's bring back the other hair and this is has a shader on the rest doesn't this is like a houdini viewport box it's nothing crazy though and it's not too bad so we can go in here and we can all give it the shader we need so this has hair shader one this has no hair shader and this does not have a hair shader so now everything has a nice shader to it and this is now at least for this tutorial uh what i wanted to show so the next thing we do now is we just really very quickly uh create the shaders for this i don't want to go into much detail because we are super long already but this is what grooming is it takes some time to to get to look right so now we head into the material context and i am creating an arnold material builder and this will be my base and in here i'm just creating a surface shader hooking these guys up like that oops not there here go up duplicate or copy paste this this is our eye shader and then we do another paste and this would be our long hair or let's do hair long uh go in here do a hair shader get rid of this connect go up copy paste this is hair short and this is hair ear so now we've got five shaders and we just quickly want to apply them in the object context so snout gets a shader short hair is this gets the shader long ear gets the ear shader then we have eyes i get the i shader and bass is the rest gets this all right then what i want to do is quickly create a camera and do control click on the camera so we generate a camera change the view note make it higher than white so let's do 1200 and then we increase this go back to the camera make sure to actually lock it and then zoom in and then frame it like this and maybe change actually it's fine like this and then we want to quickly create an arnold light like that i have a studio preset like this we don't want to view it in the viewport disable we don't want so little samples put on two at least go to the out context create an arnold node disable motion blur which i always have on on default make sure for hair you need more spec let's try three and just for the sake of this we want to reduce the depth to 1 for the diffuse let's see what else we want progressive on and i think if i hit save go to the render view render from arnold camera one hit render all right i just disabled the hair first so we can just tweak the base materials a bit faster so let's go into the base select the surface shader and let's go to the base color and we just pick something more yellowish desaturate it a lot and maybe make it a bit lighter and then we want to increase the roughness to 0.65 maybe uh this seems to work and we maybe want to make it a bit redder something like this for the eyes very basic stuff we just do a black material and we make it shiny like a mirror so we get this nice plastic look maybe some kind of roughness to it and then we just go to the object context we stop the render and we generate our snout's hair first all right the default shader is a black setup so we just want to start let's just start with the top here here of the ear and i show you a few nice tricks so you can randomize the things you need to so let's go to material context go to the hair long and what we first want to do is because we want to plug in a ramp to control the color from root to tip we cannot just use the melanine so what i want to do just disable the melanin put it to a fully uh zero which means a white shader fully white i mean and then also what i want to do is create a color or is it called ramp ramp rgb like this and i just want to connect this up directly to the output shader like this so it's pretty much like a constant right now i want to change the pattern to be v and i want to make sure that use implicit is to curves only so now you can see that we get this little ramp in the shader which is perfect and then we just need to change the colors as we need them to be so let's just pick something reddish like brown red i guess and we do the same for the tip pick the same color but make desaturated make it lighter and maybe move the ram so it's let's see maybe do this so we have some kind of falloff still going on and this would be that so what what if we want to still randomize each hair so that's also fairly easy you just do a jitter color or a color jitter and the data type is int and what is it user data int and this was supposed this is supposed to be um id for the value and then this should hook up to from data oh sorry input and then we connect the color uh sorry this was not correct this needs to go to the seed actually so the color for my ramp goes into the input like that and the end goes into the data c into the data input slot like that and if i connect these up i shouldn't see any difference but now if i change the hue for instance you can see now that a few fibers or hairs change the hue so this is very cool because i can add some minor randomization to each of the fibers it should be subtle this is not super random in the reference but there is something there's always some slight amount of randomization going on we can play with the gain slightly so some hairs are a bit lighter than others like super solid stuff and you can already see the nice um variation we get just by doing this um all right so let's see how this looks with the shader applied all right so it looks a bit dark so what i want to do is just to bring up the roughness maybe 0.5 because it's not a super shiny hair and just doing this helps a lot to just sell the look it's almost maybe a bit too saturated on the root so what we can do the ramp we can just remove this center piece and just move it up slightly and maybe just desaturate it a bit and now we get the root or sorry the tip color is a bit lighter it might be a bit much but it's obviously a creative thing so it's up to you to change it so now let's jump over to the face hair here and i just want to copy the same thing so i'm just copying i'm just copying all the nodes actually go to the short hair and just paste it in here and hook this up instead like that so now we have the same shader and we still need to know i'm not sure why it's actually so light i think we just need to restart it quickly all right so now this is with the same shader applied so now we have pretty much the same look everywhere so first i want to work on the face here and make sure that my color is not the same we definitely want to desaturate it a lot more so let's just go in this guy and just go to saturation here and just desaturate it even more and make maybe a bit more yellow and then in the in the and the tips we just make them even wider maybe like that let's see how this looks if i connect the shader back up okay we definitely see some variation now and for the last piece we just want to check out the the groom on the on the ears and they want they're supposed to be a bit more shiny than the rest so let's just go to the ear uh yeah hair ear i copied the shader already in here so first let's do the same kind of desaturation we did before on the root and on the tip i'll make it a bit yellow like that so now we have both in place and what i want to do for this guy i just want to reduce the roughness so it's a bit more reflective which gives us a bit more shaping like that and one thing i want to do is i think the hairs in in the face are a bit too thin so in the object context i just want to go to the um to the snout here and make sure it's a bit thicker maybe try point 4.04 and let's see how this looks and one thing i forgot to set up is before we actually do render here what is interesting or important is depending what kind of style you want for short hair it's mostly better to use the mode with thick and then also the bases should be b spline which actually curves your hair a lot nicer than the default one uh the automatic one so let's just move all too thick over here and then b spline save the render and let's just frame it a bit better so we don't see his ugly naked body so scene view let's just zoom in here go back to cam one lock it maybe like this and go to the camera settings instead and change the focal length to maybe 85 so something like that we can play around with depth of field if we want but um i think uh i it doesn't matter much for this sake here um just to finish if i should finish it off i just quickly draw some density on his on his torso here so it's just not super clean and i'll just use the the hair gen here for this guy all right so this uh finishes up the render so just looking at this i spot already lots of things which don't work for me but it's essentially it's just me going over it and spending more time to make it work so one things i notice is that the snout the shorter hair here is definitely not correct it's too clumpy and it's it's it's just too too dark it needs to be brighter and i think the thickness for the longer hair is too thin looking at the reference here they are definitely wider in diameter which i don't have they look too thin here what i think works nice is the hair here in the ears it's maybe too fluffy it's it's not as you can see these lines which i don't have but in general i think this is actually working the best of all of them um again this is a tutorial to show you how to do grooming at least like use a few techniques and i think those showed pretty well uh yeah so the next thing i would do is work on the the snout area and the obviously the the shoulder pieces did i just brush it up very quickly together so yeah i hope you liked this small in-depth tutorial about how to set up a groom how to set up guides how to manipulate them how to generate the hair on top of that and just all in all how to work with different sections of a of a asset and paint certain density masks to just work on those certain areas and i think this this video showed you a good overview how to set it up again this is not a one-to-one match to my reference and it was not intended to be it was just to show you the process and i hope in the future i will see more from you like see more grooms you there using these techniques or whatnot and i would highly appreciate if you would share your renders with me and again if you like what i do leave me a thumbs up below and leave a comment as well i always like to read those and yeah i just want to thank you guys stay healthy out there you know it's a it's a bit of crazy times out there today or this uh coming weeks and whatnot so thanks again and i hope i will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 16,865

Rating: 4.9775281 out of 5

Keywords: arnold, arvid schneider, fur, grooming in houdini, hair, how to groom, making hair in houdini, rendering hair in houdini, shading hair in arnold, vfx, 3d modelling, lookdev, rendering, 3d rendering, lighting, 3d lighting, maya tutorial, visual effects, vfx artists, vfx tutorial, vfx effects, autodesk, 3d tutorial, render, solidangle, shading, 3d render, tutorial, simulation, houdini fx, sidefx houdini, houdini, htoa, houdini tutorial, sidefx, procedural modelling, arnold houdini

Id: yZDnxrlrASQ

Length: 68min 9sec (4089 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020