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Complete beginner: Can I create my own modeling tools in Houdini?


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Hi. I'm looking to replace modo as my main tool, but I'm running into walls, workflow-wise, when trying modeling in houdini (been following tuts etc). I get that poly modeling isn't houdini's strength, but being an experimenter and a tinkerer I really like what I would be able to do in houdini down the line and I'm prepared to put some time into it. My question is, can I create my own modeling tools in houdini, basically? For example, the bridge tool in houdini: select one polygon, activate tool, select second polygon, press enter, adjust. It's just very clunky, following this 1, 2, 3 step every time you want to bridge. In Houdini, with or without python scripting, can I make a tool that takes two polygons (or polygon islands) and creates an adjustable bridge between them in one click/keypress, for example? 

tl;dr: Can I create my own modeling tools in houdini?

Thanks!

edit: I don't mean from scratch, of course, more "can I make the existing tools behave differently?".

Edited by ManHatTan
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I'm not very experienced in Houdini myself, but I can tell you how I would approach something like this.

As a relative beginner, I have no idea how to make interactive viewport tools (like the polybrigde tool).  But I do understand what it produces, namely one polybridge node with the source group and destination group already filled in. So I would have a look at how to group the source and destination polygroups. Possible options are a group node, a partition node, a delete node and/or a wrangle node. That all depends on what the input geometry might look like. Possibly loop through the geometry to make multiple source and destination groups.

When I have figured out how to make those groups and applied them to the polybridge node, I'd make a digital asset of it. A digital asset is still a few clicks, but it might not need to have any polygons selected (saves a couple of clicks) and might do several bridge operations at once (saves a lot of clicks)

Hope this helps

 

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