I found that displacement does not work on instances, I mean, different instances cannot have different displacement outcome.
And if we calculate the pure mesh data then we eliminate the leverage of having instances because we would have to have the mesh data in memory.
The only way I can think of is having a proper shader inside cycles that actually visually removes goemetry but it’s not affected by transparency limits, like a true/false shader that ignore bounces that go through them, something like that, that will not slowdown the render and will not be affected by transparent bounces.
I’m not a developer, but maybe there is an option to adapt displacement pipe to convey instead transformation data plain greyscale values taken from node setup and write to vertex color/weight?
Because that’d be absolutely fu**ing amazing.
EDIT:
Ekhem.
I must take back parts of what I said.
I’ve mistaken Displace modifier and Displace Node.
So updated idea would be:
What if instead outputing particle coordinates from Cycles, do the exact opposite? Such as the particle system could output to Cycles? Where the user could take particle input and combine it with other nodes. That is very close to Particle Nodes I assume. And there is also new hair object type planned in the 2020 roadmap.
(It looks like this topic is completely dead, most likely everything is waiting for gn to complete)
Hello, about a year ago I made my addon specifically for the hair of the characters, due to the fact that the blender editing methods did not suit me.
This is only a concept at the moment, but are you trying to use margins to shape your hair? Are there plans for mesh based hair generation? Currently, geometric nodes do not support splitting the mesh into instances. But for hair, it could be very helpful with styling the strands. Using geometry as a shape for pulling hair:
This provides a full coordinate system for the strand, as opposed to following a curve.
One of the more frustrating parts was that for the particle system, I couldn’t get the coordinates of the hair in the world. The same goes for their positioning.
At the moment, the hair has practically no data other than the mesh. I think they need attributes, both for the render data and for defining areas of higher density for simulation.
Keeping the hair node running all the time can also be a good way to create bone animations.
A physicist is a rather complicated and costly thing, which is sometimes superfluous. Bone binding for a curve is not the best solution yet, it’s hard to think about hair at all …
