Plugin available for Houdini® on Windows and Linux, all production builds of 20.0, 20.5, 21.0 and 22.0!
Check out the latest docs here.
In 2014, Carbon made its big screen debut in DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon 2” where it was used for some of the most challenging CFX shots.
Ever since then, Carbon has been used extensively in the VFX industry for a variety of applications, ranging from sails, ropes, chains, plants, to the most demanding Hero cloth and skin simulations for animated and Digi-double simulations.
Most of your favorite blockbuster movies from the past 10 odd years have been relying on Carbon in one way or another.
Our Carbon For Houdini and Carbon For Maya plugins are created by the same team, and using the same underlying c++ libraries, so users can easily use either platform and find themselves in a familiar environment with comparable features and simulation behvior.
In addition, Carbon for Houdini supports Carbon Tissue and Carbon Plumage / N-Lattice.
You can find an ever growing list of YouTube videos for our Carbon For Houdini plugin.
Check out these playlists:
Latest Features
For all of the latest features, please have a look at our Carbon 3.0 page here: Carbon 3.0
Why Choose Carbon?
Proven Track Record
Over the past 15 years, we have had customers from across all continents (except for Antarctica. But we're optimistic that we can convince some penguins soon. Especially with the new 3.0 plugin release) and from many industries, Film, TV, Advertising, Games, Fashion, Education, CAD, AR/VR, and even Robotics.
Customers choose Carbon because it is deterministic, reliable, robust, fast, and produces unparalleled results.
Carbon delivers stunning realistic cloth behavior, while also offering many tools to art direct the simulation to help make your vision come to life.
Hero shots in big blockbuster movies and TV Shows, to quick previs tools, to fit analysis for fashion and footwear, to training AI, to running Robotics simulations at 1000Hz seamlessly interacting with Haptics controllers… and so much more.
Carbon can do it all.
We have a proven track record of excellence and trust over 15 years!
There is no other Physics Solver like Carbon on the market!
Universal, Flexible, and Lightweight
Carbon itself is not integrated in an inaccessible closed-up larger software package, like most other Cloth solvers on the market. Carbon at its heart is a lightweight, dynamic and innovative c++ library, developed from the ground up by our UK based team without relying on any third party libraries aside from Intel TBB. Which means you can easily and quickly integrate Carbon into any c++ based application, no hoops – no headaches.We have created commercial Maya and Houdini plugins, but also integrated into UE5 and Unity for custom projects. Some of our customers brought Carbon into their own plugins in applications like UE5 and Rhino.
Quality and Performance
Carbon Cloth uses an advanced cloth model to deliver high quality cloth simulation which combined with robust multi-layer collision, supports the very highest quality Hero cloth simulation. Highly optimized code combined with a multi-threaded design from the ground up, ensures that Carbon delivers high quality with maximum performance.
Carbon Cloth is production proven for simulation of clothing, ropes, sails, nets, and deformable skin.
Today, Carbon Cloth is used by many large and small studios, around the world.
Robust Collision handling
Carbon Cloth provides very advanced collision and can handle collision between fast moving objects with ease.
The Carbon Cloth collision supports action AND reaction between:
- Cloth and Character
- Cloth and Cloth as layers
- Cloth and Cloth as self collision within one cloth
- Cloth and Rigid Bodies like buttons, chains etc.
- Cloth and Character skin (where character skin is also a Carbon Morph)
and also, reaction between
- Cloth / Rigid Bodies and Velocity Fields (Wind)
Carbon has long been recognized for the best Cloth simulation. Nothing beats Carbon's robust collision, speed, and realism, but some users can find it too technical and unforgiving.
With procedural detangling that all changes, as now Carbon is detangling your intersecting layers in real-time, as soon as it detects an issue occurring.
No matter whether you are already using Morphs to deal with intersections under the armpits or behind the knees, or if you have been using Colliders and struggle with intersecting animations … this is going to be even more robust now. We have been testing this technology on our most notorious scenes and have been blown away by the robustness and smooth behavior of the new Detangling. This is a game changer.
Check out the short clip of detangling in action:
Garment Import & Construction.
Carbon For Houdini supports a wide range of options in how garments are constructed.- From welded meshes, to stitched panel garments,
- Import from garment design tools or authored in Houdini.
- Garment Processor nodes to accelerate the setup of complex garments.
- Full support for anisotropic fabric properties.
- Fast deformers to map thick render meshes to simulation meshes.
The latest Carbon Garment Processors make it easy to import garments from Clo and Marvelous Designer.
Artists using Carbon have been keen to simplify and speed up the process of taking Garments from Clo3D (or Marvelous Designer) and bring them to life with Carbon.
The new Garment Processors take you through the setup process in Houdini and Maya step-by-step, doing all of the heavy lifting, and taking advantage of exported XML information to set up stitching and crease angles. We support both welded and panel-stitched garment workflows.
Physics Modelling
Run Carbon like a game engine!
Timeline-independent live simulation supports modelling of Carbon Cloths and Rigid Bodies.
This is 100% physically correct motion, not some sort of quasi deformer.
Game changer for simple tweaks and more complex draping - such as scarves or shirt sleeves.
Supports toggling the Carbon Stasis mode on a per object basis - freeze objects in space while still respecting collision and Cloth constraints.
Check out the tutorials:
Physics LOD
Now you can iterate fast by running a low resolution Carbon Simulation and once you have the basic look, use that to drive a high resolution sim.
Physics LOD is very different to a geometric upres using a deformer.
With physics LOD:
- It generates physically correct detail
- Collision is fully managed as it is running a full high resolution collision solve.
Taking advantage of the new Trail parameters, setting up Physics LOD is easy and only two parameters have to be manually tuned.
Watch the videos below to see the whole process start to finish:
Folds and Creases
Some creases are meant to be permanent. Typical cases for this include curtains, dress shirts with collars, skirts with pleats or pants with pleats.
Carbon has a variety of tools to handle explicit creasing:- Paintable and animatable wrinkle maps.
- Explcitely set and animate an angle on an edge group using the Carbon Crease node!
- Paintable and animatable angular plasticity allows artists to control how fast folds/creases recover.
Here are some tutorials showing the Carbon Crease node:
Goal shape control
The Goal Skin is an attribute that describes the strength of the skinning constraint between the Goal Pose and the current cloth pose.
The Goal Skin can also be used to describe the nature of each individual node, from fully dynamic to dynamic and constrained and finally kinematic and constrained (pure animation). Kinematic nodes do not generate collision with other kinematic objects.
An advanced use of Carbon Cloth is the use of the Carbon Morph node to create a deformable skin for a character. This has been used in many situations from pinch mitigation under the armpits and between the legs, to deforming the points on a dragon head while the hand strokes over them to deforming the belly of a creature when pressed by the arms and legs to squash and stretch of the body to deforming the ground when something lands on it.
Analysis tools
A selection of analysis tools is provided to allow inspection of the character to identify areas of pinching, and inspection of the cloth to identify any geometry corruption.
Aerodynamics
Carbon provides the interface for Drag, Skin Drag and Lift aerodynamics parameters on all relevant scene nodes, supporting built-in sources for wind.
Full Anisotropic Support
Our Carbon Cloth supports the full set of Weft, Warp, and Bias anisotropic parameters.
9 Material Presets
The final piece of our efforts to simplify the Garment workflow is the addition of Material presets.
We have a wide selection of presets which should cover your standard Clo3D materials and beyond.
Please note that we always recommend using the Carbon Remesher to convert your meshes into Quad aligned geometry for optimal expression of anisotropic behavior in Carbon.
You can download the latest Carbon Material Presets from this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KsftLtm8kJZbUZyrtbLax9FzAqIhNIwqabYp5lhcDcE/edit?usp=sharing
Please make sure to also read through the document linked in the spread sheet explaining all recommended Material Preset Requirements!
... and so much more