Gordon

You could implement a gather() loop and use that to retrieve the normals of the nearby surfaces, then use that to adjust N. If you keep the maxdist as short as possible, it might not be horrifically slow, maybe....

Build up your maths skills, after that, Houdini is easy

What would be the best way to add a python script via a callback or something similar that will automatically be rerun every single frame? Ideally in a somewhat context-free state, before any networks are cooked? I want to put a kind of master script into the scene that will monitor and maintain the scene state and cook or branch sops interactively. Any ideas? Thanks.

Yeah, I saw those, I just wanted to keep things as simple as possible for the moment though.

Ok, so it turns out there's two cl.exe's, I just had the wrong one in the path ... so uh, if anyone needs a CHOP that'll take an xbox 360 controller as input, I have you covered

Ok, so I'm just trying to compile a couple of the CHOP samples for 9.0.794 on Win64. .. and I'm getting; libCHOP.a(libCHOP.dll) : fatal error LNK1112: module machine type 'x64' conflicts with target machine type 'X86' So I figure I just need to change the MACHINE flag, except, where the hell is it? How do I pass different compiler flags to hcustom? On windows it's a standalone exe instead of a shell script and all the options seem to be hardcoded into it. Anyone? Should I even bother with hcustom on XP64? Cheers.

Ah, guess that nixes qhull as an algorithm then. I didn't realise the Martian labs on was still available.

Well my goal isn't specifically to make a convex hull sop as quickly as possible but to get used to the HDK so I'll try scratch building it qhull is a pretty straightforward implementation so I'll try that one, if I can just stop screwing around long enough to write it

Ah, ok, well at least I know what my first HDK project will be Thanks.

I've had a search but most of the convex hull threads seem to be years old. Is there an in-built way to generate convex hulls from a set of points that I'm missing? Cheers.

Well that works too

That is correct, a uniform variable is simply one that doesn't change across a surface, so renderman only needs to store it once. Consider it like a detail attribute. I'm pretty sure that in vex shaders everything is considered "varying" ie. it's assumed to be non constant and vary on a per point basis.

You can query the camera's transform matrix directly, by getting the .tm or .transform.matrix property of the camera object. I'm pretty sure you can also construct your own transform matrix to do the rotations and inversions for you, multiply the two together and generate your rotations and position information that way in one easy step.

Yep, that did it, thanks. I wish these things hadn't had spaces in the names, ideally I'd grab the name of the preset by string matching with the pass I'm trying to update, but unfortunatley grabbing oppresetls returns 16 args instead of 4 (4 strings of 4 spaced sets)...

Simple enough question, how does one go about loading an operator preset if the preset name has spaces in it? If I try for example; oppresetload $node Preset With Space In It I get invalid usage, if I try; oppresetload $node "Preset With Space In It" I get, quite bizarrely; Error: Missing Token "{" Any ideas? Besides not using spaces in the preset names, which would have been my choice in the first place, but sadly the ship's pretty much sailed on that one. Cheers.