Vellum Cloth in Houdini & Solaris: A Practical Workflow
A grounded look at simulating Vellum cloth in Houdini, retiming it, and lighting the result in a Solaris/Redshift studio scene.
Vellum makes cloth in Houdini approachable, but a believable result still comes down to a few fundamentals: good constraints, enough substeps, and control over timing.
The fundamentals
- Constraints — start simple (stretch + bend); add weld/attach only where needed.
- Substeps — most "jittery" or exploding cloth is under-substepped. Raise substeps before raising stiffness.
- Collisions — give colliders thickness; thin geo is the usual culprit for poke-through.
Retiming and art-direction
Sims rarely land on the exact beat a shot needs. Caching the simulation and then retiming the cache (rather than re-simulating) lets you art-direct timing without losing the solve. Cache to disk early so playback stays fast.
Lighting it
A cloth sim only sells if it's lit well. Dropping the cache into a ready studio scene — multishot cameras, Redshift lighting and AOVs — turns a technical test into a finished shot.
That's exactly what the Vellum Cloth using Solaris & Redshift scene provides: a production .hiplc with the sim and a Solaris/Redshift studio rig you can fork. If you want to go deeper on procedural deformation, the free Points to Surface Morph tutorial covers related VOP/MOPs techniques.
Get the fundamentals right, cache early, and treat lighting as part of the cloth work — not an afterthought.
Want the actual Houdini files?
Production scene files, HDAs and free video tutorials — built on real shots.