Mario's VEX functions

[Stremik]

[Mcronin]

The easiest thing to do is just drop everything that's in the houdini folder into your $HOME/houdini folder. On Winders by default, that's C:Documents and SettingsUSERNAMELocal SettingsTempHoudiniX.X. On Linux it's just /home/USERNAME/HoudiniX.X.

If you put the OTL folder in there they will load automigicly. You will find these new functions in VOPs. They are easy to locate because the are all named Axyz... and have nice colorful icons. Not sure if they have help though because my help browser craches everythinme I try to open it.

Read the text file and look at the demos he has included. Maybe it will help explain things.

[Mario Marengo]

Thanks Mike.

Sorry for the confusion (I do these things all the time and just assumed they would be implicitly "understood" by everyone... my bad).

Let me see if I can explain things a little better:

First of all, I'm not sure if you mean "how to install them?", or "how to use the VOPs?", or "Where are them functions, I only see VOPs!?". So here's a FAQ-like response for all cases:

What are they?

The useful "things" inside this bundle (the type of "assets"), are VOPs, not VEX functions.... (they are actually both, but let's keep things simple for now, K?).

@MarcHorsefield: Maybe we could change the link to read "VOPs" instead of "VEX Functions" to avoid confusion?

Each otl in the AxyzBundle1/houdini/otls directory contains the definition of one VOP (i.e: one VOP per otl). The only exception is the demo.otl which contains some HDAs for demonstration purposes.

What the heck do they do?!?

Various useful things

I tried to beef up the help on most of them. But if after you read the help and see the sample usage in the VopDemo.hip, you're still confused about something, then I'll be happy to answer any question you may have about a specific VOP (the accent here is on the word specific ).

How do I use them ?

In the same way you use any other VOP.

Just so we don't have to deal with any installation issues, let's do this: cd into the AxyzBundle1 directory (wherever you unpacked it) and open up the VopDemo.hip file. Then do the following:

1. Switch to the "Vex Builder" desktop and create a new shading vop-net, say a "Vex Surface Shader" net.

2. Go inside this new vop-net, and popup the Tab->Generators menu to see all available generator VOPs (alternatively, Tab->'a' will show you all the new VOPs, since they all start with the letter 'A').

3. Choose one of the "Axyz:..." vops and plunk it down. Read the popup help, and start connecting away

So.... Just use them in exactly the same way you would use any of the vops that ship with Houdini. Make sense?

How do I install them?

If you want to have these VOPs always available whenever you start Houdini, then:

1. Outside the otls directory (in AxyzBundle1/houdini) there is an index file called "OPlibraries". This is a text file where each line contains the path to an otl file. If this file is found anywhere in one of the paths in HOUDINI_PATH, then it will be automatically read by houdini at startup, and the VOPs will get loaded into your session. Each entry in OPlibraries can either be an absolute path, or a path relative to any of the entries in HOUDINI_PATH. And since $HOME/houdini<version> is one of the default members of HOUDINI_PATH...

2. You can mirror this structure in your home directory so that houdini will load these VOPs every time you start the program. To do this, follow these steps (in all cases, replace "$HOME" with your home directory, and "houdini<VER>" with the version of houdini you're running, e.g: "houdini6.1"):

[Mcronin]

Wow, sorry for my atrocious typing in that last post...

Anyhow, thanks for sharing Mario.

[Stremik]

Thanks Mario!

I was a little confused because when I uzipped the archive I got an file without extention, so I wasn't even shure how to formulate my question.

I guess I meant "How to install them?"

Anyhoo. You've answered all questions including those that would sertanly

arize after installing.

[Stremik]

Crap! I finally figured it out.

Here's what happend.

When you hover you mouse over download link in od[force] codex section,

in Explorer status bar it shows that there is an file with .tgz extention.

AxyzBundle1.tgz

But when you klick on the link, in the "Save" dialog box it gives this file an .gz extention.

I didn't notice it at first and when I was extracting downloaded archive I would get an file

without extention instead of all the OTLs and example files.

[Mario Marengo]

But when you klick on the link, in the "Save" dialog box it gives this file an .gz extention.

Explorer is Evil!

Yes; the file is tarred and gzipped. ( .tgz )

Glad you caught that Stremik -- I'm sure it will save someone else from some Microsoft-induced headaches.

Cheers!