Houdini 17 Wishlist

[edward]

On 4/10/2017 at 7:03 PM, LaidlawFX said:

Here is a simple use case for this production workflow Houdini is not the final Render engine. If is not the render engine then it is not useful to manipulate the data with. 

Why does that require full round-tripping? It requires that you round trip, sure. However, you don't need a working HIK rig back into Maya after you've processed it in Houdini. You just need something back into Maya that you can render as expected. ie. you can tolerate baking of information when exporting from Houdini.

[edward]

On 4/11/2017 at 10:03 AM, Skybar said:

Make $FF show up properly for sequences with substeps in file dialogs.

What do you mean exactly by "properly" ?

[LaidlawFX]

47 minutes ago, edward said:

Why does that require full round-tripping? It requires that you round trip, sure. However, you don't need a working HIK rig back into Maya after you've processed it in Houdini. You just need something back into Maya that you can render as expected. ie. you can tolerate baking of information when exporting from Houdini.

Your lack of imagination is amazing... How do you know if the current system can handle the baking of information when exporting from Houdini? Say I want to pass it back into motion builder to do further work on it, and then render it in Unreal, Unity, or perhaps a proprietary render engine. Just like every other animation pipeline out there does. Or better yet I have a custom Studio pipeline that needs to process or handle the data, prior to exporting it out to a custom formatting for their own unique compression algorithm. I see why Houdini will never be the animation package of choice.

[Skybar]

2 hours ago, edward said:

What do you mean exactly by "properly" ?

It shows up like file.1.$F.bgeo, when it should be 1.2, file.$FF.bgeo. In other words I get tons of small $F sequences instead of one $FF - so you cant just select it without modifying the path afterwards. 

[Guest tar]

It would feel super natural to be able to add an arc to the bones when using divisions. MMB drag would be nice.

[edward]

On 4/19/2017 at 1:19 AM, LaidlawFX said:

Your lack of imagination is amazing...

In general, full round-tripping is not feasible because it won't work unless Houdini solved the HIK rig exactly the same (eg. use the same source code) as the other DCC packages.

[edward]

On 4/19/2017 at 3:12 AM, Skybar said:

It shows up like file.1.$F.bgeo, when it should be 1.2, file.$FF.bgeo. In other words I get tons of small $F sequences instead of one $FF - so you cant just select it without modifying the path afterwards. 

I pretty sure I've seen sequences from customers where they used conventions like: file.$SEQ.$SHOT.$F.bgeo ...

[Skybar]

3 hours ago, edward said:

I pretty sure I've seen sequences from customers where they used conventions like: file.$SEQ.$SHOT.$F.bgeo ...

Sure but thats not what I'm asking. If you have a sequence like:

file.1.bgeo, file.1.5.bgeo, file.2.bgeo, file.2.5.bgeo - it wont interpret that as $FF, but it will make multiple sequences like file.1.$F.bgeo and file.2.$F.bgeo. But I want the whole thing to be file.$FF.bgeo. I'm doing this very rarely, but when I do its always annoying.

[edward]

On 4/21/2017 at 3:49 AM, Skybar said:

Sure but thats not what I'm asking. If you have a sequence like:

file.1.bgeo, file.1.5.bgeo, file.2.bgeo, file.2.5.bgeo - it wont interpret that as $FF, but it will make multiple sequences like file.1.$F.bgeo and file.2.$F.bgeo. But I want the whole thing to be file.$FF.bgeo. I'm doing this very rarely, but when I do its always annoying.

What I was trying to say is that if it did get interpreted as $FF, then cases like the example I gave would get the $SHOT into the frame, thus breaking the workflow for the people using that convention.

[Skybar]

1 hour ago, edward said:

What I was trying to say is that if it did get interpreted as $FF, then cases like the example I gave would get the $SHOT into the frame, thus breaking the workflow for the people using that convention.

Yeah ok that I can understand. Maybe using $FF is used so rarely it doesnt really warrant its own solution. But fact is its still annoying  

[LaidlawFX]

On 4/20/2017 at 9:00 PM, edward said:

In general, full round-tripping is not feasible because it won't work unless Houdini solved the HIK rig exactly the same (eg. use the same source code) as the other DCC packages.

If there is a legal issue to replicating the fbx data, I could see that as an issue, however, that should have been stated way earlier if that was the case. Eitherway there are a few ways to package the same data, with out using the exact same source code, with a different dcc. The HIK logic to create the data is not exactly hard, how they pack it into the fbx might be a bit different.

[LaidlawFX]

24 minutes ago, Skybar said:

Yeah ok that I can understand. Maybe using $FF is used so rarely it doesnt really warrant its own solution. But fact is its still annoying  

You could do a new variable, like $FD, $FFD Frame decimal or something with a better name. This would solve both issues.

[edward]

5 hours ago, LaidlawFX said:

You could do a new variable, like $FD, $FFD Frame decimal or something with a better name. This would solve both issues.

How would $FD / $FFD behave differently to solve the issues?

[LaidlawFX]

On 4/22/2017 at 7:37 PM, edward said:

How would $FD / $FFD behave differently to solve the issues?

I'm writing out the full steps to issue, as it makes the issue transparent. The $FD/$FFD doesn't seem like the right solution in this case, the issue seems to be more in the file dialog when you fully parse through it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

If you have written out incremental frames via the file rop i.e. Start/End/Inc  (1,4,.25)

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/geometry

with $FF as so: $HIP/geo/$HIPNAME.$FF.bgeo.sc

In the "Choose Geometry/File" browser for instance it will look like this.

When you toggle Show sequences as one entry, instead of seeing a single entry you will see one for each decimal allocation, and for the . This appears contrary to a single FileWrite.$FF.bgeo.sc sequence.

If you are using the file browser to select one of these sequences, it will pick it like this: $HIP/geo/FileWrite.3.$F.bgeo.sc, or the main one like this: $HIP/geo/FileWrite.$F.bgeo.sc

By changing the frame to read in increment and by varying the shape with something like color per each subframe, fit($FF,ch("../rop_geometry1/f1"),ch("../rop_geometry1/f2"),0,1) you can easily see the substeps prior to the file read.

If you use the file sop to read and you pick $HIP/geo/$HIPNAME.$F.bgeo.sc it will change the interpolation at each solid frame at .5 so you don't have gaps. With $HIP/geo/$HIPNAME.$FF.bgeo.sc it will read the frame interpolations at 1, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, etc... and will not interpolate the frames. So you need the file browser to have the option of showing not only $F but $FF which is Skybar's issue. 

The example of file.$SEQ.$SHOT.$F.bgeo.sc is the alternate method you are trying to avoid if we tried to modify $F, or $FF to handle this through out the package we run into more problems. Additionally, the file browser however will not show $SEQ, or $SHOT in it just like $FF, as it only knows $F. So the inherent issue being the display in the file browser is showing those multiple files, and not showing an option for $FF after the first relevant one, and they make you feel like you need to select them to access the subframes. With shotgun or custom file readers and writers you generally don't look at this browser. So really just modifying the display of options in the file browser could suffice to solve this problem.

One simple solution is to include in the browser not only $F when you toggle on Show Sequences As One Entry, but also $FF right under it.

Another solution is to have a second toggle box next to Show Sequences As One Entry, that says Hide Decimal view where it does a detection on $F from a viable $F.$F. that is #.#. prior to the .ext if there are multiple #.#.#. as that is the default inside Houdini i.e. $HIPNAME.$OS.$F.bgeo.sc where the $F is prior to the extension. Alternatively you could put a Hide Decimal in the Houdini Preferences, maybe General User Interface??? idk what location is better.

Additionally the help for $FF in http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/expressions or http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/windows/file could explain this incongruity with how the file dialog is selected. 

Hopefully that fluffs it out further.

 

[Guest tar]

Ban network wiring that loops back on itself - don't know of any reason for it and can crash Houdini.

 

 

[shawn_kearney]

A simple framework to permit deformations on volumes, if not the facilities to sculpt directly onto SDF would be kind of cool.

Does anything like this currently exist?? I know that there are volume paint tools.

Edited May 4, 2017 by shawn_kearney

[edward]

On 5/2/2017 at 6:44 AM, marty said:

Ban network wiring that loops back on itself - don't know of any reason for it and can crash Houdini.

Is your .hip file logged with steps to reproduce? We have lots of code to deal with these situations. Furthermore, I've created set ups where I've had networks loop back on itself as part of its normal operation.

[Guest tar]

@edward Will do. The main issue is a script lost a lot of work when I believe nodes looped back, because of the default snapping, and then the Undo did something strange like remove nodes instead of reconnecting.  Totally forgot about the backup folder so that work was 'gone' as I rebuilt it. 

Edited May 6, 2017 by tar

[Thomas Helzle]

Yeah, had unintended output-input loops happen a lot when H16 was new, somehow the new snapping etc. makes it very easy to happen. I got rather cautious now, but also wondered if it shouldn't be prevented by default.

Cheers,

Tom

[sebkaine]

Having the equivalent of those Zbrush features would be great :

- Zremesher : Rebuild low poly with clean quad from a very high poly

- UVmaster : ability to analyse complex mesh , create seam , unfold automatically 

Edited May 9, 2017 by sebkaine