Pin Table

[AndrewVK]

LCD optype

lcd.zip

[danteA]

Hope you don't mind - I posted this up on odforce's codex. I love .optypes!

Be my guest.

dante

[edward]

Here's my attempt at improving the effect previously done by Mark E (http://www.sidefx.com/community/download/s...ples/index.html) using Frank Firsching's voxelization methods. The only problem I have right now is that it's too slow in the last copy sop to make it really feasible at higher table resolutions. Any ideas are welcome.

I'll post a movie later.

PS. You'll need to turn on point display to preview the effect. It's all done via point instancing.

xmen_table3.hipnc.gz

[edward]

Ok, here's the divx movie. I just realized that the pins aren't properly aligned in their final state. Oh well.

torus_pins.avi.gz

[edward]

I guess I should have looked at Frank's files more closely. I've now fixed the alignement problem. Also made a few clean ups that should speed things up a tiny bit.

xmen_table4.hipnc.gz

[FrankFirsching]

Nice edward! You're the first one (apart from the creators of the effect) who comes up with a solution, that can handle overlaps and multi-segments in the pins. Too often I have heard people saying: this effect from x-men is very simple, just use distplacement maps.

And yes, I'm also not happy about the speed of my method I'll try to enhance this, when I find some spare time, because my next plan is some Lego-animation in the style of the "White Stripes" music video "Fell in Love With a Girl".

[edward]

At a resolution of 20x20x20, the voxelization is not the bottleneck. The much slower part is where I need to displace each group procedurally. Where's that Loop SOP when you need it? Instead, I do it the ultra-slow way of deleting all the geometry except for a particular group, move it, and then copy it.

At a resolution of 50x50x50, just creating all the points via the copy sop of the lines takes a long time. So while this was a neat prototype using only basic Houdini operators, it's not really feasible without some custom coding.

[edward]

Ok, here's a much faster way of doing things and no loop sop even needed thanks to Jeff L. Interactive speeds at 50x50x50 on my home computer.

xmen_table6_sm.hipnc.gz

[edward]

And a badly lit, bad camera angle render (divx) ...

pintable.avi.gz

[dynamoanders]

Hey guys.

I´m trying to learn Houdini and one thing I try is to achieve a similar effect, and thought this was an awsome asset to learn from, but I get errors when I open it in Houdini app 11.

There´s something in the vex (which I don´t know good enough yet).

Could you give me some pointers of how to get the scene working?

Thanks

//Anders

[edward]

Here's a quick fix of the file. The Spline VOP inputs was shifter over by 1 input. Don't ask me how it works anymore though because I've since purged any knowledge of it.

xmen_table6_sm_h11.hipnc