Houdini Tuft Maker v2.1 (beta) HDA

This node can generate and grow grass blades or similar vegetation meshes (and curves) from the surface of the input geo. It's quite fast and flexible. The asset contains the 3 demos I show in the video (updated to the current version, of course).

Use it to make tufts or crack it open and learn some of the VEX that drives it.

A key goal for me has been to achieve stylized looks and to control randomness a fair bit.

Yes, some cotton candy clouds are possible, too.

v2.1 Grassy field demo

v2.1 Animated growth demo

v2.1 For-each metadata demo

Changes:

• v2.1 Re-written rotation makes rotating 10s of thousands of strands faster
• v2.1 No Variance Threshold weirdness anymore!
  
• v2.1 Fixed rotation framing for alignment. Grassy field demo included which clearly shows correctly aligned strands perpendicular to the axis of most increase in the falloff attribute.
• v2.1 Rotation axis menus available
• v2.1 Pscale/Width randomization parameters
• v2.1 option can give interesting sweep results (for angles less than 90)
  
• v2.1 The previous (v2.0) asset definition is included.
• v2.1 More efficient falloff attribute creation

v2.0 Stylization with the full set of sweep parameters now promoted

• v2.0 Point orient attribute now follows the correct curve framing convention.
  
• v2.0 All sweep parameters are now exposed (Thanks to above fix, and this ties back to the promise of stylization capabilities I made at the very beginning.)
• v2.0 Variance Threshold bug fix when working with less than 20 points.
• v2.0 Example node graphs now contain correctly embedded geometry.
• v2.0 Minor tweaks to parameter defaults and the documentation.

Note to full commercial Houdini users: Download via Orbolt.com is possible.

I'll be stoked to see what you can create with it.

Cheers!