These days have been great to advance more and more in my feather tool, and the whole shelf tool in general.
I manage to reduce the feather gen time to 0.004 s per feather, which means 1000 feathers in the 40s. this is using some Houdini guide process, which means that the moment that I can change them all to custom ones will be hugely improved. My goal is to take it to 0.002s per feather. that way I can make them live in the model and not just work on the actual feather template but on the posed model.
Here is the latest tool, one of the slowest tools that I was using was the length, so I have been trying to make a new one, and with that one also the length preservation for the modifiers. which means all the noise, lift, bend, parting etc, now have length preservation!
Here is how it looks pre length preservation ( left ) and with length preservation ( right )
I am implementing two types of preservation, one that is via edge length, calculating each of the edges and culling them when they reach a higher factor, so direction based, and the other one that is using the differences for a scale based preservation, that will scale down the whole strand instead of using the direction of the strand. ( basically extend or scale )
You can see now that some of the original artifacts that the default Houdini node ( frizz ) had, gets hugely reduced after adding the preserved length as the random gets distributed in world position.
Here is a more detailed variation on the noise modifier
and here is a bend variation
My aim is to release the 1.5 version of the shelf in January.
The secondary method is scale, that will transform the whole curve to match the final size, while the primary method is to reduce, which takes the curve direction in to account and reduces the curve along the strand.
Here you can see the original noise (left), the scale method (center) and the reduce method (right )
If you want to support all this development you can join us on Patreon at https://jesusfc.net/