Recently, I have been experimenting alternative ways of doing cloth effects. I always had an idea about using the points as simple particles or spheres while using the edges as constraints.
I didn't know how to set up hard constraints until I came across this post on the odforce forums:
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/24901-bullet-soft-bodie-in-houdini/
This is the answer I was looking for. Now all I had to do was use the sim to drive the geometry in SOPs. I am really surprised haw fast it is. What makes it great is that it uses simple spheres as packed primitives with Bullet Solver.
Here are some demos:
You can easily set up pin constraints by setting i@active to 0.
For tearing, you set a Primitive Group, called broken, to the constraints. The tricky part is applying it to the rest geometry in SOPs.
You could get some interesting results with the constraint network.
Reading animated positions in SOPs