frankvw

Hi! Casual houdini user here, looking at a way to avoid long setups/slow interaction I have with massive or Trax when doing some simple background filler characters. Sooo, I am toying with the idea of using houdini for a small number of background people in a spot. I have my rigs and cycles and all works OK for tests and I'm liking where its going but manually swapping chars in and out at the moment and although the shots will be short and simple fillers, there could be a lot of em. So, I need to work out a way to cloth my rigged character cycles and swap in and out random, simple cloth definitions - doesnt even really need to be sim cloth, simple poly model cloth probably fine. Ive done similar with trees and buildings and such like before with copy stamping, but anyone tried similar with clothing before on characters? Is it practical? (before I go too far down a path that might not be so quick and easy as I think?). Did you ray the clothing on? Did it deform ok with the character and its rig? Any pitfalls to watch?? Thanks any answers, experiences, etc, F

Hello! I made the mistake of upgrading a workstation to H9.1/rman 13.5 and it has not been a warm and fuzzy experience. H8.2/rman 12.5 works perfectly but the H9.1/13.5 combination will not give me any framebuffer for ip or md and no shop previews so everything has to rendered to images files and 'sho'd' from there or off to ribs and manually shader assigned from the rib files. No textures ever appear in renders (default plastic shader). No shell erorr messages or complaints, ran proto_install for mplay, updated shaders to library first with rmands then slo2otl.py, also set environment for HOUDINI_RI_SHADERPATH to include all rman and h9.1 shader locations. So ... does anyone have H9.1/13.5 running for real? I know there has never been any proper docs or help files for rman/houdini integration but generally I've managed to get it up and running in the past after trial and error. This time I am defeated and just rolling back to older versions. Any help much appreciated. Cheers image attached is only way to render image. Any framebuffer setting errors but if I roll back to H8.2, framebuffer works fine when set to ip or md with framebuffer.

hey Aaaaghh!! No way. I searched for this a couple months back as a way to make a huge sprite forest from single rendered frames of L-systems but without success so the shader programmer guy did it with the points through prman ...... where do you find the magic export parameters to pick it up in VOPS/Mantra? Where is it in the online help, or is it an operator? Or do you need to make out an expression like when you pickup Dop things? And more importantly, is it accessible to mere mortals? Any help much appreciated. Cheerio

Hi, I have been provided a geo sequence as obj files, I need do some houdini things to the character to make him gooey and melting with metaballs. All fine so far, something that worked out fine on another character. Problems I am having are that the geo sequences for this critter have varying topolgy, points and primitive numbers varying slightly throughout the frame range. And it is a legacy animation long since departed and only resurrected for this one piece, so I can't go back to the original animation that produced it. Anyone know a way to unify geometry points, primitives, vertices across an animated geo sequence like this? Thank you,

Hi, Anyone done that before? I have a method. I meta convert the animation and fill the volume but that is not an effecient way. I tried making a copy sop on individual particles but it doesn't interpolate cleverly so it looks very uniform. Is there a single node - or a way to use copySop - that will duplicate a small number of particles to make many more particles but with some randomness? Cheers!

Hi, No, I already have bones that are animated from the mocap process so that they each are driven by existing animation curves. The question is can it be possible to 'layer' IK handles onto this so that the existing toe,heels, etc move the newly added handles in houdini, but if I then wanted to move the handles, it would add extra animation like normal IK would. I can't see a way of getting that feedback to work - but then again, I don't know if any mocap software can do that 'post' capture either. Cheers

Hi! So I am still working on yet more crowd sim stuff. I get supplied to me a small library of animated meshes that I bring into houdini and do my thing. Now and again, I want to make certain changes to certain characters but just very small animation changes, not worth really bothering the character guy with. Now, I did a little experiment where I bring in the pose geometry and some mocap animated bones and use the autorigging and it works just fine for me to add my little changes to feet and hand positions. The thing that I have been wondering about during this process (not using the character tools very often in houdini but thinking a bit about how takes and layering works in houdini aniamtion) is can I apply FK handles to the mocap skeleton bones that I have imported? So that the handles will follow the existing animation but if I wanted to alter the animation slightly, I could just pick up the handle? Has anyone ever come across a method that can allow IK to be added to existing skeleton animations? Cheers! Frank

Hi! What can I say? Thanks guys, I never get stuck for anything thats thrown at me and my houdini thanks to odforce. Just wish I could contribute more myself ....... So these examples definitely have me on the right track now (if I can produce anything useful at the end of it all, I'll post up an *.hip if its useful for anyone else). The projects growing bigger by the day now as the client is getting enthusiatic about the speed I can get stuff through to him on houdini. So one of the last additions I am wrestling with now is how to set the individual particle sphere diameter (or radius) to the largest x or y or z length of each individual object's bounding box dimension. I don't suppose anyone has tried something like that before in houdini, by chance? Cheers

Hello and happy new year! The start of the new year has brought me a fresh challenge this week. I have a little crowd-type sim to tackle that is really straight forward but the objects animated (hopefully) need to be animated at the exact centre/centroid of each object for it to work properly. And they need to be arranged at their exact, intial starting position in world space. So I need CopySop or expressions or suchlike to loop through the world positions of a dozen objects, put a particle at their centre point and then make a parent to the object so that when the particles move, the objects will follow them. What do you think? Cheers

Hi, So another little related question to my last, if anyone could help that would be great. Sorry if it is an obvious one, I have only recently switched to houdini and still finding my way around. So basically I am trying to make some liquid climb up and over an object in a very specific way. I have a little animated black and white texture map moving over and around the object that the client has agreed as a little rendered animatic story board. I can get the attractor PoP and point ordering to do a similarish thing with my slime particles but I want to get really tight control over it. Is there a quick and easy way to make attractor particles follow the Y height and frame number or maybe UV values of a map, using expressions or gradients or texture maps, in the pointSOP or PoP? Anyone ever tried anything like that before? Cheers, Frank

Guys, Thank you for all the replies, all very helpfull. Frank

Hi, Anyone downloaded and got the Wisp :v1 vexpop to work from the codex downloads section? I tried it and it no workee. Before I start trying to pull it apart and have a look at it, just wondering if anyone had used this little tool before with results? Cheers,