For Loops and If then Blocks

[Justin K]

Hello all, 
 I am currently trying to work my way through this class https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbfGN8yOVys to get a solid understanding of how looping is set up in Houdini and I am getting lost.   

I was actually trying to rebuild this tutorial https://vimeo.com/132844157  in H16, and realized I didnt have a strong enough grasp of how loops worked to even begin. Atypically I can find my way around by looking into the documentation, but for some reason the documentation on how the if then blocks and for loops work is not as descriptive as some other node descriptions have been.  I will say that I understand at least basically the concept of looping, and also have used neighbor count and neighbors nodes in the past, but from 15:00 on (in the first video) it is getting hard to not only replicate his result but understand WHAT he is doing, which is far more important.  

Does anyone have a bit of time to give a more thorough explanation of the process in the video?  

I understand that he is (I think) trying to run the original RGB values of the original points across the neighbors, and in process of these needs to utilize the index of the for loop as a way to clamp the distribution of color.  But that is about as much as I understand.  I dont know what the index of the loop actually is, it starts at 1 and not zero in this case.  I DO understand that the neighbor count not only stores the number of neighbors, but a cartesian coordinate for each one, and so is enough in and of itself to allow you to apply color to the neighbors in 3d space, but  the math is not adding up on my end, and the variable he adds is not working like he says it should do in my own script--and I know it is because I dont understand the process itself well enough.  

I hope this is not too vague.  I'd really appreciate it if someone could give a more um, beginning oriented explanation of this process?   Please!  Or at least direct me to some videos that can help me understand it better. -- I dont want to be just pressing buttons.  

Thank you!

pipes.hipnc

Edited August 15, 2017 by JKeil