IMPORTANT:
Keep in mind that this addon is not production-ready yet and has a lots of issues! You will most certainly encounter some bugs. It is not a finished product yet.
Today I am releasing an addon that I have been working on for over a year now - Medusa Nodes.
Here is a two-part introduction:
Part 1
Part2
It started as an experiment and grew bit by bit. Unfortunately, I was only able to work on it in my spare time, hence it took a little more time than expected.
At the moment the add-on is not production-ready. You will most certainly encounter some bugs.
The add-on features several nodes, including deformers such as Guide, Clump, Noise, Curl, Braid, Children, and Trim. The Guide and Clump deformers in particular were very interesting to work on.
The deformers are placed in between the Generator and the Visualizer nodes.
Also, there are additional Mask Groups for masking purposes, which are pretty simple but crucial in achieving realistic hairstyles in my opinion.
The system will become slow if you increase your density to a pretty high value (up to 2 Million Control Points Overall) so I would avoid using it for full body fur type grooms
“Region” or “Parting” maps are supported by Guide and Clump deformers. (Image texture Node should be set to Closest type of interpolation).
The Braid deformer is not set in stone and will improve. The fishbone braids, where side hairs automatically find the place they can feed into the main braid, are far from being perfect, but maybe some of you can find them useful. I will try to improve its usability as well because its parameters are needlessly overcomplicated at the moment.
Addons UI
Medusa Nodes has its own hierarchy viewer.
There is an “Add Deformer” button, which will add the desired deformer right on top of the currently selected deformer.
Addon can also expose ColorRamp and FloatCurve widgets for quick access.
It was interesting to work on the project and I hope some of you will find it useful.
During the process, I had a chance to learn a bit.
There are quite a lot of ways one could go with geometry nodes in regard to hair, and we have already seen many beautiful examples of hair nodes, which explore some of these new ideas.
If there is any interest in this addon I am going to continue improving the functionality of these nodes and the addon overall in general.
Thank you for your interest and support.
History:
This is ongoing WIP. Experiments with procedural hair creation in Geometry Nodes’ new Fields system.
In this thread I am going to post some of the results of these experiments.
Automatic clump generation is one of the main goals of this project.
For now Clump Modifier supports:
- Automatic clumping region generation.
- Ability to chain multiple Clump Modifiers. (still WIP)
- Combining “User-Made” curves with generated once.
- Offset hairs which intersect with the emitter object by its normal.
(Main and secondary clumping region visualization)
Combining guiding curves and secondary clumps:
Clumps can be now fully controlled with guiding curves:
- Rotation along guiding curves’ tangents.
- Clump profile can be changed globally.
- Profile can be adjusted with spline radius individually per guiding spline.
- Tilting individual guiding spline for twisting effects.
You can submit the bugs and issues regarding the addon here:
