Face Generator HDA

In the last live stream, I had the opportunity to showcase my new Face Generator HDA. It can generate a different face mesh driven by a single random number parameter. If you feed in $F the current frame into the seed parameter, you can get a unique face mesh generated on every frame. Very quick and easy! And it gets even better!

At 15:10 of the Live Stream video on the top right, I start demonstrating the Face Gen HDA.

Houdini Head Generator HDA

The randomly generated face mesh can be fed into my Lip Sync HDA and can be animated procedurally. This will add to my growing list of procedural tools for character animation in Houdini.

Houdini Head Generator HDA

Workflow

Then there’s an option to enable the “High Resolution” for the selected head on the HDA. This speeds up performance, because of the high poly count it isn’t efficient to use generate a random head with high resolution constantly. The workflow is to select a generated head and then enable the “High Resolution” option later.

I picked a fish head looking alien from the Head Generator HDA as an example. I thought this looked pretty interesting. I wonder what type of dubbing voice I should use?

Substance Painter Texturing

Substance Painter

I imported the mesh into Substance Painter to apply some textures. Substance Painter requires the imported mesh to have UV’s and I couldn’t figure out how to UV my Head mesh in Houdini so I used Blender’s Smart UV Project tool as a middle step to UV unwrap the mesh, before texturing.

Houdini Head Generator HDA exported & imported to Substance Painter for texturing & then finally Blender for Rendering

Blender’s Cycles Rendering Engine

I couldn’t resist using Blender awesome Cycles rendering engine to output an image of the Fish Alien Head with textures that were generated from the previous step in Painter.

Houdini Head Generated Mesh, imported to Blender for Shading & Materials

Blender Materials & Shading

I created another Alien head from my Head Generator and used Blender for materials and shading, skipping Substance Painter step this time. If you continue reading further down, you’ll see I took this a step further and make some quick Lip Sync animations for this head!

I can exported the generated face mesh out of Houdini and imported it into Blender for materials and texturing. This worked well for the Alien Head Generator!

Lip Sync!

The Head Generator works perfectly with my Lip Sync HDA! I analyzed the audio file of a script I recorded and turned it to speech animation using my Lip Sync HDA tools that I made in Houdini!