Thursday, April 05, 2012

Wiresolver Noodles

One of my esteemed colleagues sent me this delightful link today. First thought was "Holy frak! That's awesome" and the next thought was "how could this be done in Houdini?"

A quick setup later (one of the shots I'm working on deals with using the wiresolver to drive twigs and sticks, so...), tada!

Sadly it's only 35 frames long, cut the sim short as I have an appointment this evening. But in any case, it answers the question, yes, Houdini 12's wiresolver can definitely do something like that. If you watch the last few frames the fork's mesh is just arriving on-camera. Earlier tests indicate that the fork interacts with the wires - whether they can twirl like the Blender sim remains to be seen, but I can't see why not. The friction settings will definitely need to be tweaked for that to work but yeah.

Blender is really up and coming (sadly I can't get used to the interface, else I'd go for that vs Cheetah 3D), and I wonder how much stress it is giving to the big vfx software developers.

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