I'm a third-year student working on my first groom project, focusing on the Bar-Tailed Godwit, using Houdini. Because of my limited experience, I've been struggling to understand how to blend between the feather templates I've created for the primary and secondary wing feathers using the feather template interpolate SOP. While I'm still getting familiar with VEX, I'm struggling with understanding how to initialize the template weights. Currently, I'm randomizing the template selection across the generated guide curves. However, I want to explore a new approach like in this sideFX tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFjxTe42200&t=52s [www.youtube.com] where a blend between these templates generates new feather types. This way, I hope to achieve a more diverse and realistic result for my project. Overall feeling a little bit lost with this one.

You need to setup two primitive attributes on guides :
- templatenames: string array of feather names that you want to interpolate
- templateweights: float array of feather weights, it tells the blend amount to take from each feather template




Most of the work would be adjusting weights in templateweightsattribute. For example, a possible way would be to adjust a weight attribute for each template, then build an array of all these attributes. This opens the possibility of controling weights procedurally with Attribute Adjust Float node or Guide Mask node, and manually painting weights with Attribute Paint node. You could adjust weights on guides directly, or do this on the skin then transfer to guides using Guide Skin Attribute Lookup node.



Attached a hip file with an example using this approach.