Partial Presets

[heiligeslama]

Hey,

I've been spending some time to extend Houdini's preset system. Essentially what it comes down to is instead of creating presets for the whole node you can

create presets for only selected values. The selection is done by recreating the whole interface with check boxes next to each parameter.

The presets itself are still Houdini presets. So these can be passed on to people who do not have the tools and they can use them.

You can directly upload presets into otls to share them.

The applied presets will only change the values of the stored values the rest will stay like they are. Which gives a lot of options for composing different in a flexible way.

If you select expressions or parameter which are referenced by an expression on the same node the system will track that and select the referencing parameter as well, to make sure the logic

of the node stays in tact.

By default the preset manager node creates an internal snapshot of each node it creates presets from and is able to restore them.

You are also able to blend between different partial presets and generate new data. That is working for animations and ramps as well and animated ramps and what have you.

The resulting data is trying to recreate the resulting system as close as possible with the least amount of keys necessary. Which means to can wedge pyro sims and pyro look dev in a way the resulting

data can still be used and understood by a human, please check the youtube videos for that.

It's in orbolt for free. The link is https://www.orbolt.com/asset/_heiligeslama::presetManagerSubnet

Please be aware that this is still a beta version. I tested it very heavily but I can't guarantee I covered everything.

For more examples please check out the video demos walking you through the example file.

Please watch the videos in HD.

I will release the whole code on github a little later on when I understand what open source license makes sense to be used, so if anybody is interested to contribute, or want to give me feedback for improvements you are welcome.

There is actually a lot more stuff going on. All the nodes are documented and I will follow this topic, so if you have questions or want to offer me a well paid job go ahead.

Cheers!

Niko

Sorry for not having explosions or fancy pictures.

[kleer001]

Whoa, that's some pretty fine grained parameter juggling. Good work! Not sure when I would use it, but I like it.

[heiligeslama]

Thanks for your comment. I guess one usage, because of the fact that you can store animation and you have blending mechanisms would be the core of a pose library.

Further more you are able to speed up look development by storing the variable components of your scene with different extreme values and start wedging between them.

Not that you can't do that right now, this way gives you more control over grouping and organization of your values.