Overview
This tool generates an arbitrary beak using relatively artist-friendly controls.
Using a set of guide curves and color ramp parameters, it generates splines for the edges of each section, samples the curves for the overall shape, skins it, then combines the inside and outside.
Why
Personal project. Meant to be used on future characters. Knowing I’d be making quite a few different beaks, I figured it efficient to spend some time making it into a useful tool instead of a one-off.
General Walkthrough
Guide curves are generated from the artist’s input and then resampled to the desired resolution. A set of cross-sections is generated from these curves, and they are wired together. These cross-sections are combined to get the final shape, everything is fused and any final adjustments such as hooking the beak at the end are made.
Looking Back
Some things aren't as optimized as possible, but there’s also some cool stuff in H19 that might help this.
Controls are utilitarian but organized. Each loop generates one fourth of the end product. The first generates the outside of the top half, second the inside, and ditto on the last two for the bottom of the beak. Making this a node/subnet and using 4 of those would clean it up a lot.
For my first 'medium’ project while still learning Houdini, I can see in hindsight quite a few issues.
Lack of fencing results in a lot of unnecessary geo
Lack of good tuning handles
UX is cumbersome for the end result
While over-engineered too early, I still find use for it in my side projects today
Current iteration includes cere (yellow section at left) controls
Overview of network