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Hi, I've been trying to figure out how to make an asset that I can use to blend between 2 states (1 of which is animated). Basically I want to manipulate a points position based on it's animation rather than between 2 points (linearly). For example if I create an animation of a grid moving up in the Y and twisting in the Y over 24 frames I want to scrub that animation based on an attribute like Cd.x. From my research it seems I'll need to use CHOPs (which I've always struggled with beyond using for lag/spring animations). Is there a way to remap an attribute value like Cd.x (0-1 range) to control each points animation channel (1-24 range)? Sorry if I'm not explaining myself well here however if anyone can help point me in the right direction - I've tried bring in different states of my test geo into CHOPs (static, animated, color attributes) and tried blending them through different methods (blend, composite, CHOP VOP) without any success. Any help would be appreciated, thank you

Yup, the TableImport SOP was all I needed Thanks again

Thanks Robert, I always knew the cookie was the most heavy handed approach to solving this. Your solution works very nicely - I'm going to try to make this method word for deformed geo now. I know I won't be able to scale to 0 for that Thanks again

I'm trying to create a method for something that looks like an extruded altitude map and I have a setup that works but it is very very heavy when dealing with more than 5 layers in a small space. I was wondering if there were any other ways of approaching this? Any pointers will be appreciated topoRelief.hipnc

Thanks for the help guys, my python knowledge is very poor so I'll be careful of getting into any methods that I can't problem solve at this time. Although this is a good reason to push myself I suppose...

Hey guys, I'm trying to look for references of animations driven with external data like .xls documents (or any other data files) for example and I'm not having much luck finding anything. If anyone could point me in the direction of any papers, videos, example files or references it would be really helpful, thank you.

Thanks guys, really helpful. Petz - more advanced than I understand but it'll give me a good reason to brush up on my VEX in order to implement the rotation part like in the example video. Thanks again

I'm hoping someone can help me out with creating a gradient descent algorithm in VOPs (it might not be possible?). I've be trying to reverse engineer this - https://vimeo.com/60606152 which is done with Rhino. I can get as far as the point where you need to push the points back to the surface (timecode 2:49 in the video). They do this using a surface CP node (which as far as I can tell imports the vectors for the nurbs surface?). Is the there an equivalent way of doing this in VOPs or am I going about it in the wrong way? Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you, Mark GradDescent_01.hip

Basically I'm trying to create a DA that I can select a particular object and be able to control where the specular/reflect appears on the surface with respect to the camera. I know I need to calculate the reflection angle with reference to the normal of the surface and the camera - but I want to be able to animate the point on the surface so I can control the position of the specular over time. So essentially it should be a null that I could move across the surface of the object and at the angle of reflection I'd have a light which would cause the specular (which would move accordingly if the null is moved). Sorry, does this make sense? I've been scratching my brain with this all day as I know logically how to build it - I just can't figure out the best way to do it in houdini... yet (I'm going to keep trying but wanted to see if any one had any tips/ideas). Cheers

No worries, I have solved it myself - I used a voronoi fracture config node after the RBD Fracture node.

Hey, I'm very new too Houdini (been using it for pretty much a week - loving it so far ) so I apologise ahead of time for my naivety. Basically I've got a sphere that is fractured using a Voronoi Fracture SOP which is then made a RBD Fracture object. I've got my simulation looking nice over 40 frames at 25fps - simple exploding rock really but I'm looking to re-time the cached .bgeo sequence. I want the initial explosion (first 20 frames) to happen in 5 frames and the last 20 frames to be dragged out for 125 frames for a slow motion effect. Here is where I've been looking into using the Timeshift/Timeblend SOP's but I can't seem to get it working - I think this has something to do with the generation of new points in the Voronoi Fracture SOP?... I got that from another thread on this forum so not sure if that is my issue. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction p.s. I've attached my file for you to have a laugh at . I'm sure it is riddled with other problems and any other advice on my setup would be greatly appreciated Orb_TimeRemap.rar