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That's a helpful list, thanks.

Just curious, do you know what LOP and TOP stand for? Pixar's development of Houdini bridge lags behind those for the other DCCs, Maya, etc. I wonder if these are all tied to interactive rendering? GPU acceleration, Nvidea denoiser, they aren't sitting still in rendering performance.

Same here. Out of curiosity, what DCC modeling app is your go to for modeling?

as long as it doesn’t become the spagetti tangle that is MeshFusion in Modo...

Nuke 11.2 has a new node building feature that allows you to drop and drag parameters to an empty node to construct a Frankennode that's pretty slick. https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/new-releases

In yours, the normals are being calculated by subtracting the center of the object from the point position (@N=@P - (0,0,0)). Instead, you want to attach a Polyframe node, set the Style to First Edge, uncheck Normal Name and Tangent Name, check Bitangent Name and set to N. This will calculate the tangent as you expect. That will cause unexpected results with your end points so clean those up with a wrangle with the end point numbers in the group field: @N=normalize(@P-(0,0,0)); Since they're just vectors, you can also directly manipulate Normals in fun ways. Attached script has a simple example of the ever helpful lerp function and another one using the point function. It's a bit more involved as you'd need to loop that over an array of points to do multiple ponts. Hope it helps, Kevin Normals.hiplc

Yeah, it doesn't work out. The Apple tax is strong in this one.

At $700, I think I'll add one to my aged trash can Mac Pro and make it a home machine when the mythical upgradeable Mac Pro arrives.

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/7/12/17563646/apple-blackmagic-external-gpu-price-release-date $699. No comment on the aesthetic

VolumeFromAttrib works pretty well. Thanks Illusionist. I also tried VDB route and tiaingulate2d (which I had forgotten about). VDB required a decent amount of fiddling but did a great job and roughly the same memory / time to process as VFA. Trianglate2D became unhappy after a couple millionish points so I didn't get anywhere with it.

The help docs for the Terrains say that "Lidar Import can load LIDAR formats (for example e57) as height fields" but there's no option to convert to a HF that I can find? Am I missing something? http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/model/heightfields.html Thanks, Kevin

Re number of replies, your question isn't tips and tricks, it broadly covers entire departments and careers of CG artists. Integration is largely the domain of compositors but upstream a small army of people are dedicated to making it happen, from the on-set sup to the texture and materials artist to 3D artist to the compositor. Take a look at The Art and Science of Digital Compositing by Brinkmann and the VES Handbook of Visual Effects by VES. Great references. And there's a British Film Industry Visual Effects Foundations ebook running around that has a concise descriptioin of the skills involved.

Oh, right, I remember that now, there was a guessing game about what they could be on odforce too I think. Thanks.

I must have missed a news cycle. Where did you read this?

Thanks, Mark. I like the tattered effect you achieved. It might make a nice decaying effect. Did you mean first input or second above for the animated sequence? Using an animated noise etc in the second with small frame values works pretty well. Attached an example if anyone needs a starting point. heartOverlayhip.hiplc