revelationsr

Hi there. I dont know if my basic approach to this tool is correct. If any better ideas are out there. I would love to hear them. Ok. So I am making a tool meant to be used in Maya. It is basically a scattering tool. With this the user is meant to paint the locations for grass to spawn. This will distribute a bunch of points or packed primitives. With a second brush they are meant to paint where rocks spawn. Again spawning points or packed primitives.. Obviously the grass is not meant to spawn where it can penetrate the rocks. So I use a point relax and the pscale to move the grass out of the way when a rock appears. All good so far. I would like to be able to add a function to manually move points after they have been spawned. With my tests I can do this quite easily by adding a edit node in the right location on the tree. So I can simply move the points before the relax tool. This gives a rather cool effect of watching grass move out of the way as I move clusters of rocks around. My question is. What do I need to add to my menu to allow the user to hit a button and select and move any points at will? Cheers

Hi there. I have built a setup to deal with a production characters cloth simulation. I have packed it all into an HDA. So far so good. What I would like to do is use that HDA in tops. I put it in the HDA processor and all seems to work. Except with I generate the work items. It only shows up with 1 work item. How do I go about telling it it needs to run over the frame range? cheers

@Sean-R Thank you for your responce. The primitive order will come from the first rig. So @primnum. If I create a array string from that then the order in which the primitives apear in the array should mirror how they appear in the scene. I will save 1 frame of that character somewhere so I can refferance back to that. That saved refferance I can compare to the current version of the rig. I should be able to find the differance there. The question is how to create a attribute on the new rig to reflect the order of the original rig. Once I have that I should be able to use a sort node to reorder the new rig to match the old. Cheers

I am very new to arrays but I am sure this will solve a problem I am having. I am working on a project doing cloth siming. Animation in Maya and cloth in Houdini. The characters goes back to rigging from time to time due to issues that pop up. When those character return there so no change to the geo. How ever the primitive order will have changed. Meaning if a shirt that is primitive 25 has a setup to sim. When I get a new cache with a updated rig, primitive 25 might be the left shoe. Now changing this is not a problem. But with the more complicated characters we are looking at changing 30+ locations. Some do slip through the cracks causeing problems down the line. I was thinking of a way to solve this problem. Maybe there is a better way to do this. Please let me know. But I was thinking maybe arrays could help. The primitives I get from Maya all have thier object name attached to them. In the "path" attribute. I was thinking maybe if I could make a string array with all those names. Then compare that to a string array of the updated rig. I could assign a attribute to the updated rig geo refecting the order that the primitives should apear in. Then using the sort node to re-order the primitives before I seed them into simulation. I just dont know how to do this. Any help would be awesome.

Hi there. I have a simple scene that I would like to multi thread to try and understand Tops. I am importing an alembic. I do a few things to it. Then export it out. My setup in tops is. I drop a rop geomatry node. Point it to the last node before I write out my result and thats it. In theory it should load up frame 10. Do the thing. Then write out frame 10. How ever it seems that it want to load up the entire alembic file for each frame it wants to write out. It is a 300meg file over 200 frames. Needless to say I am running out of ram really fast. What am I doing wrong? Cheers

Hi there. I have this highly repetitive task I would like to try and automate as much as I am able to. I have it just about there but the one thing that remains is to point it at the correct cache to load and the correct location to save. The shot cache always has the same naming convention. But the directory it saves to will version up. Is there a way in the "alembic load" node to look at then load what ever the highest version number might be. Also Then save an alembic with that same version number. is there something hscrpit can do? Or will this be a python thing. If so any thoughts on that? Cheers

Hi there. I have this scene (Attached File) where I have several lines criss crossing over each other. Through a combination of color and Alphas I have them making some nice ramps and gradiants. I would like to have that result transfered over to a grid. Since the underlined geomatry will be overlapping alot the attribute transfer node does not give the desired result. One layer of the geo will have a high color value. The other will be black. So i get a patchy result of color and black This is really a tough one to explain. A picture is worth a thousand words. There is a scene with the problem. Once you see it you will know what I am talking about. Cheers transferAttQuestion.hip

Hello. I will have a look at the scene in a bit. Just walked it. Well we need the final orientation of the trees as an attribute for export to Maya. Since the trees are very high rez, also there are thousands of them, we want to render useing a proxy. So we build the animation in Houdini. Export simple geo. Plant proxies on that geo in Maya (pun intended.). Render. Just the orientation seems to be a tough nut to crack. Cheers

Hello. I have me a little isue. I have a copy stamp that is dumping a bunch of trees all over the place. They have their random rotations and scales stamped in as one would expect. But the ground is moving. This means that the tree will follow the normals of the moving ground. I how ever need to get that rotation of each copy, in degrees and push that out into an attribute. Cheers

Hi there. I am trying to create a chunky soup sim with flip fluids using variable viscosity. My first test seems to be doing well but there are a few areas that I would like to improve but are unsure how to do about it. So my scene is useing a texture of soup. I take some colours from that texture and use that to create my viscosity om my points. It ranges from 500 - 500000. For the most part the general movment seems spot on. There are just two things I would like to tweak. Firstly. The high end viscosity does not seem to keep its shape as well as I hoped. The points that makes up thechunks in the soup does stay together. But seems to loose its shape. Anything thoughts on keeping the chunks chunky? Secondly. I would like the chunks to always float to the top. Thoughts on that? Cheers

Wow that works do well. Thank you very much!

There is a issue with this setup. Since I need to export animation to the Alembic this does not seem to work. If the write node is inside the for loop it will write out for each iteration. For each grid. So far so good. But on the next frame it will once again write out for each grid overiding the file from the previous frame. I tried getting around this by adding "$F" to the output. Which works by write out each frame for each grid. But then I have issues loading that into Maya. So ideally I will need one file for each grid with the entire sequance. Any thoughts?

O yes this looks like it might do it. Thank you. I am going to play with this a little just to make sure I understand what is going on. Thanx again

Hi there. Honestly I have no real idea how to go about this problem. Often when at the very least has an good idea how to solve the problem, but is missing the last few steps, you can describe to the ideal solution in terms of what you alreay know about the solution. Make sence? Ok here we go. I have a huge field of plants. With packed primitives Houdini handles this shockingly well. They are all blowing in the wind. Interacting with various things that are happening in the field. All good. The problem is that we need to render this in Maya. No Houdini on the farm. So we exported this through Alembic to Maya. The Maya guy has wrote a thing that will convert this to a arnold proxy. The prosess is almost 100% automated. Works rather well. Here is where the problem comes in. The machines on the farm does not have enough memory to render this. So I broke up the field into 5 chuncks. Still not enough. So here is what I would like. I want to be able to place a grid in my scene in Houdini that covers the field of plants. I would like to automate every plant that appears in one of the grid squares to save as their own alembic. So ideally if I need to change the size of the grid later down the line to match the farm memory. It will be just the case of one slider change and go get some coffee. Or atleast this is a way I would imagine a solution. How ever this may be a very silly way to go about this. So please. if you have any ideas how to go about this problem. Please let me know. Thank you.

Hi there. I am trying to create a plant that will need to do some rather silly things. So I am going to try and sim it using wires. I create the "trunk curve" from that I am creating "branches". What I would like to know is. How do I attach these branches to the trunk. Please note that the branches are randomly generated. I would assume that I need to put the first points of the branches into a group. Or add an attribute to them. Then some how find the corrisponding trunk point. Not sure really. Also note. This studio only have houdini 16. Not 16.5 or 17. Any thoughts would be appresiate. Cheers