mestela

Answered over on the sidefx forums: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/60739/

Sure, or download and use the gamedev toolkit like Alain pointed out. Re surprising, not really, just a result of houdini's background. Its been the fx and procedural weird things app, not the uv app, there's always been other better software for that. If customers didn't ask for it in the past 20 years, why would sidefx spend time on uv display options? Better that they spend time on what their customers have needed, like more powerful simulation tools. As houdini pushes more into the mainstream there'll be more things like this exposed (and again the gamedev team are working incredibly quickly to fix things as they find them), but you can't call esoteric missing things you expect surprising any more than you could call the lack of highend water simulation tools in sketchup surprising.

Huh, the ghost of odforce posts of the past came to visit me. There's a better way: http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/?title=HoudiniDops#RBD_deintersect_the_easy_way

example mri slice sequence, and a houdini scene to read it into a volume and display it. capsicum.zip

Or if you don't need to do a simulation, don't do a simulation. Particles One-Axis Test_no_pops.hipnc

polyexpand2d sop should do this for you.

The lighting challenges on CG society were pretty good, nice to see how different people approach lighting the same set.

Well to be fair that term is used a lot in VFX, and traces back to the days of optical fx. When trying to work out what exposure you'd use for elements to do a composite, you'd shoot a wedge of multiple exposures and see what looked best. http://patrickvfx.blogspot.com/2012/01/definition-of-wedging-in-fx.html

'wedge' is the term you're after. Never used it myself, this seemed like a good excuse to try, see the attached hip. The idea is to setup your scene to write something to disk. Here I have a simple rbd setup that use a file cache sop to save the sim as a bgeo sequence. You then create a wedge rop, and tell it which other rop it will control (the file cache sop), how many times to run (4 times), and what parameters you want changed each time it runs (the global seed on a velocity sop, so my rbd pieces get different initial velocities per wedge). If you render the wedge rop, you'll see the sim run 4 times, and the file cache sop save the sim 4 times. If you use the filecache defaults, this will all be wasted effort, as each variation will just write to the same file location. To fix this, you can use a $WEDGENUM variable in the file path, that will be 0 for the first run, 1 for the second, 2, 3. That's all from me refusing to read the docs and making lots of assumptions. rbd_wedge.hipnc

This post (and page) will probably give you enough clues: http://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=ForLoops#Loop_over_names

It builds up a thickness of surface curves rather than just a single layer.

connectivity sop, primitive mode, enable 'use uv connectivity'. color sop in 'random from attribute', primitive mode, attribute name 'class'.

Yeah I noticed that too. Another way to fix it without modifying the node is to append a pop wrangle after the popsteeravoid and set v@steerforce.y = 0;

set the sleep time to 0, it disables that 'feature'.