An algorithmic approach to building hyper-realistic knits in Houdini, showcasing the organic process growth of hundreds of millions of fibers, with an ultra-efficient implementation of curve-based infection simulation.
By utilising hyper-threading and the tracking of parametric curve positions as single floats on a thread, you can move past the major memory constraint of per-point infection, providing orders of magnitude more efficiency in simulation.
Each thread records two things - an array of infected positions, and infection lengths that correspond to each position. If two lengths from positions overlap, they merge and continue. These merges occur until the entire thread is 'solved' - the fabric rendered in its entirety.
This process, rendered with Redshift in Houdini using a cloud-based rendering solution, would have been extremely expensive for a studio to recreate. However, when trying to create something massive in scale as a solo problem-solver, you have to get creative.
