This update has been so long in coming due to the troubles I've been facing animating the hair. When going through a standard Houdini pipeline for simulation, the hair would not cooperate. Instead, I was faced with a variety of issues. Hair would shoot out of the body into infinity, or strange patches of hair would flicker along every axis as if they weren't sure which direction up was. I even had problems where entire patches of hair would completely disappear off of the mesh of the dragon. I quickly came to realize that I would have to design my own pipeline for the simulation of the hair.
So that's what I did. Within the geometry network, I created my own set of simulation nodes, bringing in an animated mesh from a separate network to plug into the simulation.
The basic idea of this graph is that took the base of each strand of hair and created a group called "roots". these roots stuck to the surface of the geometry in the vellumhair node, making sure that the hair followed along with the geometry and kept all the velocity and other information it needed. From that point, it was a simple matter of plugging the vellumhair node into the vellumsolver in order to create the simulation I needed for the hair to move along with the mesh. This also provided me with the opportunity to be able to add in different effects like wind to further play with the hair and the environment it belonged to.
Alongside the simulation of the hair, I also added controls to the hair. This first set of controls is just for the length of the hair. It is a simple slider located within a null node that allows me to make the hair longer or shorter without having to hunt through the nodes to adjust them there.
Needing to take a break from the monotony that hair brings, I also took up creating the armor for Saint George. At the moment, I've created a base mesh for some of the pieces of the armor, but it is a start. After I've gotten the base pieces of the armor created and approved by the group, I'm going to go into Z-Brush to add details like engraving and wear and tear into the armor. Its going to remain fairly pristine, but still needs to show that it has been used.
