Basic Variable Question (Particles)

[Shalinar]

Hey guys, first post here. I'm extremely noob at Houdini and I've got a very basic question.

I've got a particle system going, and after the POPs system in the Source Particles SOP it creates, I'm trying to use the Y position of each particle to drive a Blend Sequence that is copied onto the particles with a Copy SOP. What I haven't been able to find is how to query the Y position of my particles. I can find their positions with the Geometry Spreadsheet, but the name of the attribute it gives me is "P[y]", and typing that into an expression doesn't seem to work. I had thought it might be "@P.y" but that errors out as well. I think one of the problems is that I'm not telling Houdini WHAT to find the Y position of. But again, not sure how to find that.

I've googled and did a cursory search of the forums here but all the posts I've found are way more advanced than this simple thing I'm trying to find  

Can you fine gentlemen/ladies point me in the right direction to find how to query this sort of basic data?

wk2_copy.hipnc

Edited April 27, 2016 by Shalinar
to attach file

[woodenduck]

It sounds like you might be confusing Houdini expressions with vex. @P.y will give you the y position of the current point. 

But if you are using Houdini expressions you may want to look at the point expression which would be something like point("path_to_node", $PT, "P", 1) or in some cases the $TY local variable will work. 

To some extent local variables have been replaced by vex, but I can never remember exactly where. If you can upload a hip file you might get more answers as people can see exactly what you are trying to achieve and give you a practical example. 

 

[Shalinar]

Hey thank you for the reply! $TY was indeed what I needed. You are right, I was most likely confusing Houdini Expressions with VEX... What is the difference?

That point expression was cool but exhelp seemed to indicate that it was used for geometry whereas I was trying to query the Y values of my particles. Even though I believe I've got it worked out (for what I need), I'll go ahead and upload the hip file, for posterity.

I'll dig into the help files to learn more about local variables. Thanks again for the help!

[Atom]

What is the difference?

Houdini supports three languages, HScript, Python and VEX. The difference is syntax. Hscript and Python are not multi-threaded, but VEX is multi-threaded.