vreya3D - Workflow Update

Hello everyone,

although I failed a few months ago, I gave Houdini a try again with better success this time.

Essentially, I wanted to rebuild the totality of my old Maya workflow in this program which is completely node based. So every function I've used (snapping, expansion, body-cloth interaction etc.) had to work here too in case I want to use it in the future, so I had to make sure everything in the node tree works.

The nice thing is there is a lot of custom stuff, well it's kinda complicated if you didn't built it yourself and can't see the logic behind every node, but what I'm trying to say is, it gives more freedom, although some limitations are still present such as for an expanding body the mass is still built at the first frame, so as the body grows it get's more airy and less jiggly because the small density mass calculation is applied to a larger body. (After a bit more testing, I found a solution for this so this is good news)

So anyway, here is a small jiggle test:

In blue are the new simulations, in orange the old approach for comparison. I tried to get it as close as possible. Both simulations use slightly different approaches, Houdini also has a FEM solver built in which the Maya approach uses, but it was extremely slow and not worth it, so I used the Vellum solver, which can kinda simulate it and is much faster.

What I found is that the body and cloth collision is definitely better in the new approach, I actually did some post fixing in Blender for the old to look a bit better. And the new approach uses actual cloth for the shirt, while in the old approach it was made from the same tissue structure as the body was, which means it could never tear and never truly behave like cloth. Which means, in the new approach things like an animated zipper opening would finally be possible.

In terms of the jiggle itself, there is a bit more heaviness in the old approach which I like, although it has its own limitations and also isn't "perfect". And just from past experience, while it looks good in a shirt, some poses and jiggle deformations look very off, especially faster ones with no clothing. In the newer simulations, I tried various positions, some not included here, and it deforms nicely in almost every pose, even faster ones.

And as you can see, it allows for cloth tearing. It is just simple tearing for demonstration, you can get a lot more detail in there if you set up the mesh properly first.

For collision itself, it definitely has a comparable quality, although I find it a little more jittery, but again, this could be an issue on my part, there are a lot of settings to fine tune.

So there are some trade-offs here and there, but I feel like the general flexibility it allows is worth it, and since it's procedural the setup is much quicker, I can just replace the mesh with drag and drop, and if the topology isn't too off from the previous one, all points and paintings should still apply.

So I'm not sure if I'm going to use this for the Halloween expansion, but we will see. Setting this up took a few days from the project but once I'm focused on something I have a hard time stopping until I reached what I was going for.

I think this is especially good for the future because the Maya ziva plugin won’t get any updates anymore, while Houdini is a whole program that will get updated as time goes on, so who knows how much improvement it we will see just from that alone.

Thanks everyone for your support!