Here are my results from following the feather tutorial. I added a simple scale animation to see how
the feather animation looks like, it looks like the solve is done very beautifully.
The issue I see here is
that I cannot seem to input geo that is not part of the feather tool. The Deintersect reads specific attributes
for the barbs [feather fluffies] and the shaft [feather center]. This leads me to potentially exploring:
1. Trying to create a square for the barbs with the feather tools so I can create leaves by applying an opacity map
2. Diving inside the Feather Shape tool to see if I can assign those attributes to other geometery
3. Since the Feather Tools are essentially grooms, looking into the Hair tools as well to see if there are other ways to solve intersections
I did a simple hair groom on a sphere and copied my rigged leaf shape to the hair. This test was unsuccessful, I was unable to deintersect the geomtery.
After doing some digging, I found that there is a Feather Surface node that will consolidate the barbs and create a smooth surface like a leaf.
I tried plugging in this shape into my previous feather Deintersect setup but it looks like this node gets rid of the needed attributes.
I wanted to revisit the kineFX and vellum set up because it seemed to be working for many artists online. An interesting idea I found was to use the feather tool to create a rig for a leaf, since it is
essentially the same shape as a feather.
After examining a downloadable Houdini file under one of my references I realized that the starting position of the vellum sim was an open leaf- not the bud position.
I animated the leaf rig to start from the open position to the closed one and then unfolded it again and the collisions were as expected! Here is a flipbook!
The next thing was created a PDG set up where I randomized the length, curve, and number of leaves for 10 vines to see how usable the results were. I think for these
vines in particular I was playing very safe with the ranges so I didn't end up with any results that were too crazy.
The total cache time was 12 hours for 2300 frames on a 3090 computer. I will
be running this set up tomorrow on the Blackwells and see how much faster it is.
Here is a flipbook of 600k plants.
Here I tried adding a rig to the main stem, but it messed up the normal orientation for the leaves.
WHAT'S NEXT
1. Create a set up so we can plug in different leaf/petal shapes and structures to create different types of plants
2. Layering vellum sims to crate plants with more detail and adding secondary motion to the plant growth
3. Work on USD Challenge project- create a fall inspired plant with the layered vellum sims as a USD variant and run the set up through PDG to create variations
4. Test particle system from gaussian splats for flower growth
