lookat on copied characters

[Muhammad Junaid Baig]

hello,

well, i've heard of this forum as the ideal place for houdini users. I'm quite new to houdini and learning it. right now i'm stuck in a situation and need your help in that. the situation is like this:

i have to fill a stadium with crowd. i have geometry cached the characters in maya and exported them in fbx with geometry cache. i've used scatter node to scatter point on my stairs and copy node to copy the characters on the points. the issue is that all the copies of the character are facing in the same direction, and i want all the copies to look at the origin (which is the center of the ground as well). what should i do with them to make them lookat a certain, either vector position or any object? the whole character is a single mesh (max of 400 faces). i only want to alter the rotate Y parameter of every character so that the character is rotated about its Y axis.

awaiting your early feedback thanks!

Regards,

-Muhammad Junaid Baig.

[Netvudu]

When copying with the Copy SOP using a template, the rotation of the copies depend on the normal direction for the points. Add a Point SOP to the points template and play with those normals until they point the direction you want.

[Muhammad Junaid Baig]

thanks javier mero!

but adding point sop to to the points helps orienting the copies in the one single direction. lets say, how do you make each point's normal face to origin? this is what confusing me. i want all the normals of every point to look at the origin <<0,0,0>>

I have also tried primitive sop and used lookat function of it, but that is just destroying the geometry.

Thanks.

[Stalkerx777]

thanks javier mero!

but adding point sop to to the points helps orienting the copies in the one single direction. lets say, how do you make each point's normal face to origin? this is what confusing me. i want all the normals of every point to look at the origin <<0,0,0>>

I have also tried primitive sop and used lookat function of it, but that is just destroying the geometry.

Thanks.

Its very simple, just subtract position of every point from <0,0,0> and feed it to your normals. You can use point sop for that with point expression, or better use VOPs.