Vellum Clothing Part 1 - Create Belts & Tie Knots
Download HIP File: HIP Belt.zip
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Breakdown for Vellum Belts Part 1
I took the Live Stream video and split it into 3 parts for the HQ edited version of the Live Stream that’s only available for Perk 2 Members-Only.
Houdini’s Vellum Solver used to model a knot tie
Summary
In this stream video, I demonstrate how to use the Vellum Solver to tie knots and model a belt for a character. I briefly go over the Vellum Clothing creation for the Tommy character that is a built-in Houdini character, which I will be hosting a more detailed step by step Live Stream soon in the coming days. The robe creation will be Part 2 in this mini-series.
Houdini’s Vellum Solver used to model a knot tie (higher poly count fed into Vellum Solver)
Increased the resolution of the geometry before feeding it into a Vellum Solver will result in a bit better simulated results as the animation you see on the right. I used a 0.03 target size for edge length in the remesh node and it totaled to 4,475 points for the simulation on the right.
The animation of the knot tie above has a lower poly count to generate the Vellum simulation. I used 0.05 target size for edge length in the remesh node to generate the above simulation and it totaled to 1,092 points.
Low Poly Count
1,092 Points for the Belt Geometry before feeding it into Houdini’s Vellum Solver
Vellum Simulation for Knot Ties
High Poly Count
4,475 Points for the Belt Geometry before feeding it into Houdini’s Vellum Solver
Overlapping Issue Causing Artifacts with Point Deform
During the Live Stream near the end at 1:30:00 into the Stream I dropped down a Piont Deform node to transfer the Vellum animation back to the original Belt geometry that contained nice UV’s. And in the Live Stream, you could see me struggle to get accurate results from the Point Deform node. I had suspected it was a topology issue and I was very close.
It turns out right after the sweep is applied and creates the initial Belt geometry, there appears to be a tiny overlapping of geometry. It’s a very tiny overlap and I didn’t notice this during the Stream. During my practice run, I used a square of slightly different size compared to the one in the Live Stream, so it never caused me issues during practice.
The fix for this was very simple, I just tweaked the original curve points so it wouldn’t overlap that easily. The HIP file available for this scene already contains the fix along with some sticky notes indicating which one is the fix.
Teaser Video
I demonstrate what I have planned for the Stream video. In this teaser video on the right, you’ll find that original scene file I was inspired by originated with one of SideFX’s Vellum tutorials. But the scene was way too large to work with because of the high quality models and clothing generated in SideFX’s HIP file. So I recreated all the geometry in a different way and with lower poly count.
By recreating the whole scene in a more low poly format, I was rewarded with a faster performance, however the node network was still too large for me to explain in a Live Stream session. The solution was to create a whole new different piece of clothing that was more simple, easy to work with, and could demonstrate all the different Vellum techniques. That’s where I came up with the vest as shown in images at the top of this blog post.