u/Plane-Good-6147

Hey everyone,

Working on a procedural pave solver and ran into an issue with stones on tighter curves.

Even when collision checks pass, bigger stones near surface edges end up with their outer girdles sticking out too far because of the local curvature.

To fix this, I added a local curvature/gap check during distribution. If the distance between the stone’s edge and the surface exceeds a set tolerance (around 0.015mm), the solver automatically downsizes that stone to the next standard size in 0.05mm steps until it sits properly and relaxing accordingly .

Seems to work pretty clean so far for keeping topology consistent on sharp turns.

Curious how others handle dynamic clearance or edge alignment on curved surfaces in Houdini?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on a procedural pave placement system in JewelCore, and it’s turning out to be more complicated than I expected.

The idea is to have the solver automatically handle stone and prong distribution based on Min/Max stone sizes, while top and side pave also account for each other’s boundaries to avoid intersections and overlapping geometry.

I’m still keeping the advanced controls exposed, so the user can fine-tune the result for different production requirements.

This demo uses a standard Grid layout. I’m currently working on the Honeycomb pattern as well.

I’d really like to hear from people who actually use pave in their CAD workflow. Does this approach make sense to you? Any edge cases you think I should be thinking about?

Hey everyone,

I've been building a dynamic jewelry workflow where components (like shanks, galleries, and stone clearance) continuously adapt to geometry changes in real-time — like this stone rotation demo.

Most jewelry designers are still strictly tied to destructive workflows in Rhino/Matrix.

From your perspective as Houdini users and technical artists: Why do you think procedural systems haven't become the main industry standard for jewelry design yet?

Is it the steep learning curve, performance overhead with high-poly pavé setups, or just UI/UX friction for non-technical artists?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!