What a Cloth Sim looks like and how to do it.

This is our workaround for the problem of exporting a maya alembic file into houdini and then tyring to rig a cloth sim to it.

Tab in a geometry node, Dive in and tab in an alembic node. Click on the alembic node and select the alembic file that will eventually be your deforming geometry. Tab in a convert node that will convert the file into houdini polygons by default. Connect the alembic node to the convert node.

tab in another geometry node, (this one will be your cloth object). On the cloth object, you may need to drop in a sort node to reorganize the points "by Y". You do this by diving into the cloth object, turning on your point numbers (on the toolbar right by the perspective view) and if they are not obviously organized, tab in a sort node. Click the view button on the sort node and then under the point tab, select "by Y" on the drop down menu and then click the "reverse" checkbox if you want it to go from top to bottom.

Open up your cloth tab, then select your cloth object, select your deforming collider, then attack to body.

The Return of the Carrot

Oh how much time I put into this and how bad it still looks. Oh well. The point of the project was to learn how to draw things procedural-ly. That means that I don't paint any of the colors on, instead we use a node network to create the colors using built in math. What's a node network you ask?!

See that ugliness that looks like an evil graph? That's a node network. Each little square mathematically determines parts of the render. Some of them make random noises (like the bruising on the carrot), some of them make random vertical lines (like the yellowish streaks), and some of them make the texture (like the cracks in the carrot). Its hard making a carrot without being able to paint anything or use any of my usual approaches. The result was ok, I guess, but not as good (or as bad) as some of the other fruit in the class. Here was the process.

Basically the process went: Colors, Texture, Lighting, Redesign the model, Final Changes, Video. Enjoy