Some more Houdini R&D!
Experimented with generating some wool knitting procedurally. I had to watch a bunch of actual knitting videos to understand how it’s done in the real world. And then I implemented the same logic to have the threads tie around to look as natural as possible.
The base of the hat was quickly created in Marvelous, and then the pattern was created in Houdini using a combination of Vex and SOPs and VOPs.
The pompom’s base curves were created procedurally as well, and then a vellum simulation was run to make them fall naturally over the hat.
It has been created in a manner that a simple patch of knit pattern can be applied on any object based on its UVs. All you would need to adjust is the frequency/size of the knots depending on the object’s size.
The wool threads were generated from the base guide curves, and then finally rendered as ribbons. The total curve count was roughly 1 million.
The shader is fairly simple, Arnold’s standard hair, connected to a color ramp driven by row_id parameter and some color jitter based on thread_id.
I’d call this project a quick study as it was done over the last couple of days after the work hours, so there’s much to be desired. One thing that’s definitely missing though is some more details on the borders, perhaps some variation in the looseness/tightness of the knit and some more fuzz. But I’m calling it done for now.
