Align object to preferred axis

[yvesklein]

Hi everybody,

I have a Houdini dilemma I hope somebody will help me to solve. 

I have a straight line. 
This line is located somewhere in the 3d space with it's own transforms and rotations.
I would like to make a spiral out of this line keeping it's position.

Now, what I have been doing is transform my line back to the origin, manually align the line to one of the axis, run some point expressions to transform it into a spiral (like the ones in the expression cookbook) and revert all these steps back till I have my spiral back in position. 

Which would be the way to procedurally align an object to a preferred axis? 

I thought about defining an up vector for the line, somehow compare it to the axis I like and multiply the line position with the resulting rotation matrix I get. Not succeeding though. 

Accepting any kind of tips on this.

Thanks!

 

[Skybar]

Made a small example with a matrix, hope it helps!

moveToOriginMatrix_dv.hip

[yvesklein]

This is excellent! 

I was completely unaware of the existence of the Deformation Wrangle. 
Very clean and elegant approach. 

Thanks a lot David!

[Skybar]

6 hours ago, yvesklein said:

This is excellent! 

I was completely unaware of the existence of the Deformation Wrangle. 
Very clean and elegant approach. 

Thanks a lot David!

For geometry it does work with a normal Point Wrangle as well, just multiplying P with the matrix instead. However I recently had to move a resizing pyro sim and the deformation wrangle worked wonders with that

[yvesklein]

On 8/12/2016 at 9:28 PM, Skybar said:

For geometry it does work with a normal Point Wrangle as well, just multiplying P with the matrix instead. However I recently had to move a resizing pyro sim and the deformation wrangle worked wonders with that

That is very good to know!
I definitely have to get more in depth with it. 
Thanks again!