Advanced Houdini Grooming

After doing a little testing with the Houdini groom and sim workflow, I've decided to try and produce a higher quality groom on a more realistic character. So I went with using the test geometry that comes with Houdini, Tommy. For this next test, I wanted to create a more natural hair and beard for a biped face. Here's a quick render of what I've got so far.

For this setup I have six different grooms going on so I am able to quickly edit any guides/output grooms. If I would have done this groom entirely on one setup, editing just the eyebrows, would have made Houdini re-cook all of the groom instead of just the eyebrows. That's not very efficient when you're looking to get something done in a certain time-frame. Just to show you what my network looks like, here's a screenshot.

So just like I said, there's 6 sets of guides and grooms. Each one of these is linking to it's own output within my base geometry node. For each output I have within that base geometry node, there are masks for it's respective guides. This lets each output allow the guides to be placed wherever the mask tells it to be placed. this way my cooks are faster and I don't have to re-cook all of it if I make a change to just one groom.

There are a few things within this setup that I need to work on to make the render a little more appealing but for now this is working. I'm also going to keep experimenting with what I can achieve using this workflow and what I can do to make it even better, if possible.