CFX Cloth and Hair at Unit Image

How to read this

Category

Production talk / cloth and hair CFX department breakdown

Contributions

• Department evolution from a Maya plus Marvelous Designer and Ornatrix pipeline to a unified Houdini/Vellum workflow with a shared input/solver/output hierarchy, resource manager and exporter
• A cloth workflow with a custom group maker and group split that color-code and order garments body-out, wrap high-res render meshes onto simulated low-res, and expose per-shot tweak nodes
• Three hair-driving methods (full Vellum sim with per-group settings against cleaned VDB collision meshes, noise-based false drag/turbulence/curl, and a wrap method onto proxy geometry), with root-recovery ramps to preserve scalp UVs

Context

A character-FX cloth-and-hair pipeline grounded in position-based / compliant-constraint dynamics (XPBD, Macklin et al. 2016) as realized through Houdini's Vellum solver.Builds on: XPBD: Position-Based Simulation of Compliant Constrained Dynamics

Correctness

Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on cinematics including Love Death and Robots Season 2 and game projects, so take it as transferable workflow structure rather than validated technique.

Clarity

Concrete and accessible; one pass conveys the shared setup and the three hair methods, with node-level details useful for reference.

How to read it

Read once for the unified input/solver/output structure and the three hair-driving strategies; revisit the group/wrap and root-recovery details if you are standardizing a cloth-and-hair department.