point sop,point wrangle and vopsop

[Hello world]

Hi

what is the difference between point sop,point wrangle and vopsop.I have used pointsop and vopsop before.does pointwrangle also serve the same purpose except it speeds up and its a vex code?

and what about attribwrangle and volumewrangle? are they used to modify the attributes and volumes?

Let me know.Thanks in advance

[symek]

Many SOPs do similar thing in essence: they modify geometry's attributes values. They are sometimes specialized and sometimes quite general. Some of them are old, some pretty new. So, PointSOP was one of first node dealing with point's attributes without specific purpose. If user wanted to change attributes value's per point in any conceivable way, PointSOP was there for a long time now (before VEX and VOPs were introduced for sure).

 

Then VOPSOP was first realization of VEX language as a processing geometry system. At first in was only points' attributes, because it was the only thing VEX could do in SOPs land. This functionality was hard wired by developers into VEX machinery.

 

Then, after some time, SESI has started turning VEX into general purpose language first by introducing CVEX, which allows VEX to process any serial data... or not even serial these days after switching VEX from SIMD virtual machine into native host instructions. With CVEX without much effort any node could be taught to take advantage of VEX.

 

So first was perhaps VolumeVOP for processing voxels, and many others (mantra procedural shaders) and finally AttributeVOP which process any attribute class (detail, prim, point, vertex) in SOPs. 

 

From those derive *wranglers which are new versions of other nodes wrapped with SnippetVOP inside to allow you to work with VEX code directly, instead of nodes. 

 

So PointWrangerSOP is old VOPSOP pre-made with SnippetVOP inside, AttribWranglerSOP is AttributeVOP with the same setup and so on...

Edited April 10, 2014 by symek

[Hello world]

Symek,nice write up! but i have one more question..

does pointwrangle speed up the process of point manipulations than the vopsop? whats the difference as both of them are derived from vex

[symek]

I don't thing there is any difference in speed. They are both the same VOPSOP inside. There is small one time penalty related to generating VEX code from many VOP nodes inside VOPSOP (contrary to only single SnippetVOP in PointWranger), but it wouldn't have any impact unless you create really huge networks (+1000's of nodes).

[Hello world]

great!