Learning VOPSOP

[Georgie]

would someone be kind enough to post a file please ;3 I've literally no idea what I'm doing and I want to see it done properly before jumping into the documentation. Thanks ;]

[Guest tar]

This is the best time to have a go at it, when you think you can't do it. You should guess, test and then review.  Only then will you not just follow the steps of others, but, really learn!

 

Please post your test, spend an hour or two on it. Really think about it, make your brain hurt! Then you'll really know what you can do and can't.

[Shinjipierre]

I completely agree with Marty, your ability to look for information by yourself is an important asset at work, 'cause you can't bother your colleagues every 5 minutes (unless you're playing with nerf guns )

[LouisXIV]

Hi this is a great thread.

Here is my approach to the day 5 challenge, with a little addition.

I wanted the object to only color geo on the outside of itself and also get it to work without SDF.

 

 

 

Edited September 4, 2014 by LouisXIV

[MrScienceOfficer]

Georgie,

 

I think your doing the exact same thing I was doing last night, you probably looked at GoergeIvans pictures and tried to implement what he did.  Which means your only one little expression short of fame and glory

but instead of thinking about what you need to do to figure this out, your thinking how the F*ck did they do this. 

 

I spent over a half hour on this one last night, I had it right in less then one minute but I spent 29 minutes on a wild goose chase because I cheated and looked at georgeivans pictures and then at another tutorial I had done the other day that used the expression I knew i needed but instead of thinking about what it was I had to do to make it work, I started getting pissed thinking about how everyone else did it.  In the end my expression needed to be tweaked slightly and I already understood why I just hadn't thought it through because I was in copy mode rather then experiment mode.  But aren't we so great spending so much time to not give you the answer

 

LoiusXIV, I'm gonna have to try to do it like that now

 

 

I eagerly await today's challenge...

[nangu]

Great thread for newbies like me!!
 
I post my file. Wire the grid with the various VOPs to see the last excercises. The one with the ramp took a lot to figure out how to use the ramp parameter.
 
Awaiting the next!!

Test VOP SOP.hipnc

[Guest tar]

Guest Instructor's more than welcome! Thank you Shinjipierre

 

 

A tad swamped currently.

[MrScienceOfficer]

Well considering we went a day without a challenge.  We must get a head a start for day 6...

 

For day 6 we will take what we have learned thus far and make an attempt at something more practical and far more challenging.

 

A collision Vop, instead of just saying, hey look those points are near those points lets make them red, today we shall attempt to make them repel them from our collision geometry.

 

I, perhaps like a lot of you will most likely fail but the road to success is paved in our failures.

[Shinjipierre]

ahah, I'm kind of swamped as well, hence why I couldn't hand anything today...

as for Louis, if you really wanted to check if the point is inside the geometry, the usual way would be to check the number of intersections from a ray, if it's an odd number it's inside, if it's even it's outside.
Problem is that the intersection VOP doesn't seem to hand that kind of result. and a while loop would be needed, loops suck in VOP

For Tom, it may be difficult to show an example result though, does odforce have animated gifs or movies supported?

 

[MrScienceOfficer]

If you get a chance can you explain that?  How does that work, even numbers being outside and odd being inside?  Is it that the first intersection will always be on the outside and the second on the inside?  I never got a chance to really get that one to work.  Or even think out the math. 

 

I was unable to even post a screen shot so I have no idea if gifs are possible, but we could always just put a link to a short video if we were proud of our work, but just a picture of the vops and written statement saying it works is good enough for me.

[Guest tar]

captain - this could work well. Everyone is more than welcome to teach more complexity, I'm concentrating on fundamentals teachings.

 

The main reason people don't progress and give up is for a lack of the foundations. Complexity is easier once that is established. 

[MrScienceOfficer]

I completely agree, I find that trying more complex stuff forces not just an appreciation of the fundamentals but at least for me, helps to see what those fundamentals are.  I went with a collision vop because I couldn't think of anything else,

but after maybe 30 minutes of messing now I might say something like implement a proper if-else statement.

[Guest tar]

The two rules of VopSop Club I believe work well, for all difficulty levels is:

 

• The teacher must have produced the challenge before posting
• There must be a screen capture of the challenge.

 

We want visual learning, and, we want to capable teachers. A pure challenge will be better suited in the challenges posting IMO. 

[MrScienceOfficer]

Hehe I agree, which is why I waited all day for some one to post a good challenge, before throwing my two cents in.

 

So I guess its actually day seven then today and we need a capable teacher to post a proper challenge...

[MrScienceOfficer]

Okay I thought long and hard and I have a challenge for Day 7.

 

For Day 7 we will build a Laplacian Smooth (average of neighbor points) Vop.

 

Have fun.

 

[Georgie]

can hardly believe I managed to pull that off but somehow I did it =D And it wasn't that complicated at all. 

 

http://i.imgur.com/ZDqvBvc.png

 

// the pointWrange is just to set color to red.

 

I'll upload my entry for day 5 later today. I did some research and messing around in Houdini since I've never dealt with pointclouds before. I also found a cool website (http://www.msawtell.com/research/point_clouds/point_clouds.shtml) with a few ideas to test out. Thing is, I wanted to let it sort of 'rest' in my head before attempting to do anything. I did recreate what Shinjipierre had posted but it was a monkey see-monkey do approach (based on georgeivan's screenshot) so I wanted to try doing it on my own.

[Guest tar]

Cool as, thanks for the challenge captain!

 

 

Hehe I agree, which is why I waited all day for some one to post a good challenge, before throwing my two cents in.

 

So I guess its actually day seven then today and we need a capable teacher to post a proper challenge...

 

I agree, it's actually quite involved to come up with a teachable challenge, daily. Probably best to skip days, if we have to, and wait, so the quality can be maintained.

 

Edit:  This could give way to a very cool idea. We could run 5/10/15 days of intense VopSop training. Same concept of visual teaching but the  'teacher' has to prepare in-advance those number of many daily challenges, then people could be prepared for an intense learning experience.

Edited September 5, 2014 by tar

[MrScienceOfficer]

I like that idea, I think so long as the teacher as time to think and prepare challenges and its not just a spur of the moment kind of thing, we could get some really cool challenges.  We would need to get the word out that we are looking for teachers to guide in these challenges and try to make a schedule of sorts, I think there would be a lot of people interested in sharing some of there tricks.

[Shinjipierre]

As for the collision challenge, I thought it was kind of fun to create so here's my quick result for the collisions (vimeo is encoding the video) : 

 

 

It uses a sopsolver and vopsops

[pclaes]

Nice going guys!
Now throw in some dot product, cross product and some trigonometry - and then some rotation matrices and quaternions. -- These are really useful little mathematical tools in your effects arsenal.

Really nice to see this level of community spirit!