Malak1000

I have an image sequence with an alpha and a tracked animated camera. I need to create some shadows on geo from it. My plan is to create some basic geo from the alpha Tracing & extruding to create some rough geo to cast shadows good enough for my purposes is no problem, however how do you project the trace node's results out from the camera? Ideally, I'd have the trace output match the camera frustum and all I'd need to do is animate the z-depth of the trace plane away from the camera to roughly match the plate I'm trying to fake shadows for. How on earth do I go about this? Thanks!

I need to populate some walkways with milling crowds. 50% needs to be heading one way, 50% the other but not neatly on different sides of the path. The paths themselves are 5-8 agents wide. What are some good strategies for getting a realistic sim? Thanks!

These are great, thanks guys.

Hi, I need a simple way to multiple-car trains along a curve. Everything I’ve come across only moves a single object and doesn’t account for separate carriages strung together in a straightforward way Any suggestions?

Literally perfect. Thanks!

I'm trying to view an additional UV map. uv (a 3flt) views just fine. However uvWind (also a 3flt) refused to appear in the UV Viewport dropdown. I created a third with the UV Texture node - uvWind1 - and that show up just fine. Though I notice that as well as being a 3 channel float like the others Houdini has tagged it a Tex. How can you tag an attribute as a Tex so Houdini treats it as a UV channel in the viewport? Thanks!

Yeah I've dived into it quite a bit since my original reply and I'm really happy with it as a solution to large expanses of meadow grass. I'd not had reason to touch the hair/fur system before but I can see how powerful it is for this sort of thing. I'm planning on mixing your method above with un-instanced 'normal' hair as shaded grass to lighten to load a bit. Thanks for the starting point!

Hi, thanks for this. It looks perfect for my needs I'm having a little trouble with your example file. The hairgen is complaining that its' using an incomplete asset definition... EDIT: ignore me, I forgot about the ancient copy of Houdini we're forced to use at work. Works great on 17.5. So as someone that's never used hair before, what are the advantages for this type of setup? I've seen a similar one where wires were just generated on the same scatter points as the instances.

Anyone?

That's great, thanks, I'll take a look!

It is possible to 'draw' sculptural details onto heightfields with zBrush-style alphas? It occurs to me this would be a great way to block out shapes & such, and yet I can't really think of any way to go about doing it, nor find any examples of anyone doing similar...

Does anyone know how to get Point World/Pref in a shader (not an AOV) in HtoA? I'm trying to make a worldspace height mask. Embarrassingly I can get it fine using MayaSamplerInfo3D but it feels dirty (and presumably horribly unoptimised) to do it. Thanks!

I'm trying to create a track setup somewhat like the one below based mostly in principals leaned from Kim Goossens' Houdini Procedural Road Creation tutorials https://youtu.be/4jLSRwlQV9M?t=3833 Essentially sweeping along the master curve for the body of the track, and copying to point along the curves for the uprights. I'm moderately new to Houdini and modelling procedurally, but I'm not doing too badly. However there are two parts of the setup in the video that I can't even conceptualise how I might go about them... 1) The system won't put an upright on an 'illegal' surface (roads, buildings) only legal ones. I can't think how to go about this sort of functionality. 2) The main body of the track is not a simple sweep, as it arches between uprights. Again, I'm just not experienced enough thinking about modelling procedurally to think about how this might be achieved. Any help gratefully received!