StickyQuickAPI

[MrScienceOfficer]

Hi,

 

The StickyQuickAPI is small API designed to allow for the easy and quick creation of interactive assets in Houdini.  

It compiles with HCustom, without any extra includes.

It's designed to relieve much of the tedious effort of interactive tool development.

 

 

For those who are familiar with the StickyAPI, this is a completely rewritten API without the UI.  The original API was very focused on larger, singular asset creation, which made integration into Houdini more difficult then necessary.  

 

This new version attempts to move towards smaller more reusable tools.

 

It now defines SOP_Tools, a specialization of SOP_Node and BM_State that allows for the event hook code and the Sop geometry to mesh seamlessly in one class.

 

It will also allow for SOP_Tools to be place in a SKIT(Sticky Interactive Tool) derived asset and allow them to be used without diving inside.

 

There was also work done on a PySkit asset, which allows for tools to written in Python, but with the interactive aspects(ray casting, selection, etc) to be handled natively.

(However the development of the actual Python tools proved to be a huge pain, particularly with the way I chose to handle persisting data across cooks.  Personally, even though I've been using Python longer, I find C++ way easier to work with anyway, particularly C++11, it's an incredible language.)

 

 

This should be considered an alpha release, while the tool and sop interfaces will remain unchanged, the way tools are setup may change slightly.

 

The API itself is pretty messy and completely uncommented, I had to throw this together in like 15 hours, so I could start working on my character animation reel.  It's just cut and pasted together from the old version and a different new version aimed at taking advantage of some of the new tools H15 exposed with a UI and all that fun crap.  

 

 

Let me know if this compiles for Linux and Mac, and if there's enough samples to actually use the code, and if anyone does actually use it.  

 

 

 

Thanks

 

Tom

 

Edited December 15, 2015 by MrScienceOfficer

[goldleaf]

It sounds interesting, thanks for sharing! What would be a way to compile it?

[MrScienceOfficer]

Ha, yeah sorry, I've haven't been sleeping much lately...

 

 

Through hcustom, just compile sqRegister.C

 

Point the Houdini Command Line tools to the folder then,

"hcustom StickyQuickAPI/sqRegister.C"

 

Simple as that.

 

 

And to get rid of that message that pops up every time you enter a tool, on line 412 in StickyQuick.h replace "..." with the path to the folder 

 

uifilename = "...StickyQuickAPI\\StickyQuickAPI\\HouEventHookUi.ui";

Edited December 12, 2015 by MrScienceOfficer