Jordan Walsh

While im here... you can also point to an extra file in the help like this: #icon: opdef:.?icon.png Unfortunate you cant do this with the Operator type Icon.. as changing name space or version of the HDA means you have to update the icon path too

Best way is to use VDB from Polys and use the surface SDF to find your surface location. the sdf will give you the distance to surface and you can use volume gradient to find the direction to surface. Works only on closed geo though... so get that poly cap working!

Well even if you "dont" use a shader, one is assigned by default, your colour just overides the diffuse colour of that shader. You might be able get something out of the standard set but its easier to assign a shader and set your AOV outputs inside. I dont think you can get a Cd export by default.... could be wrong

It should work fine, just use a bind export in you shader exporting to something like "rgbMatte" and hook up your colour attrib (dosnet have to be named colour, but must be what attrib name you have on your particles). Just make sure you have rgbMatte as one of your AOVs. The biggest problems you will come across are not matching up the names and data types properly, then you get black AOVs.

Point deform is pretty good at interpolating, id just give it a go! I would have to have a look at your scene if thats not a good option, which I cant do at the moment...

Sorry, havent looked at your file but... Cant you just select the base points of all the curves and point deform them to your surface and set the pintoanimation in sops before you send to the wire solver? That way you are feeding in a goal position to the base points on the curves and not relying on matching it up with other geo. For selecting the base point you can always use a for each loop and loop over each curve and pick the first point of the single curve

You can import a w attribute the same way as a v attrib. This is angular velocity that you can set in sops how ever you want. You can modify it in a sop solver or use a torque node to add rotational force. You can also set the orient attrib to set the inital rotation on the objects.

You can get the parmTuples included in a take with hou.takes.takes()[0].parmTuples() but I can see no way of getting the vale that is stored in the take, apart from setting to manual, change to that take, eval the parmTuple, put back to the original take, then update. Is there a nicer way to access the take parm value?

Cool stuff but seems like there is no wire collisions in there. In fact it makes no difference to have the wire solve in there at all! Any one found a way to get wire collisions in there while editing the geometry in the sop solver?

When fracturing just use packed fragments. This will give you exactly what you are looking for, centroids, transform matrix pre piece etc. You may want to have a look at the Transform Pieces sop too if you need to re apply the transforms to different geo. If you are using a timeblend and packed geo make sure you turn on "Shortest Path Transform Blending" to get correctly blended matrix transforms.

Just wondering what the most efficient way of rendering fog volumes with area lights inside them, like below. Seems raytracing is about twice as quick as pbr but I find it difficult to get rid of the noise in the very bright areas around the light. Anyone got any good trick for this type of thing?

Mess around with the Output Correction stuff. If you are using the scale mode then you want your noise to be closer to 1 to reduce the effect. Setting the output range to 0.5 and 1 should give you half the noise, assuming you had noise going from 0-1 to begin with.

Try turning on the gain and putting it up to 1 or more. This will add contrast to the noise so should show up a bit more. Also your frequency is too high, making the noise way too small to see. Try about 1.5 in the frequency. Also I like Sparse convolution noise

Cheers, I have been looking into that but it is quite expensive for massive volumes compared to a pure volume vop solution.

I'm trying to recreate the bend deformer to use for volumes. The issue is that with points you transform the point to the new bent position but with the volume you need to use a volume sample to "pull" the volume into the position with the volume sample node. I initially thought that it would be fine and all I'd need to do is negate the angle but it is more complicated that that. Is there any way to get this working? I have attached a file with the bend working on a box but broken on the volume. The bend nodes were pulled from qL library volumeBend.hipnc