Sweeping points to polygons

[draxysd]

Hi,

I have a little problem. I am making a curve sweep in houdini. My setup is to scatter points on a thin plane, noise it, then animate that along a path. I objectmerge that into a new object make a trail in sop solver and mesh everything in vdbfromparticles. I'm kind of starting to hit the vdb resolution limits (it is starting to take way too long to compute).

Is there a way to sweep a noised line (ideally just noised points) and make a ribbon out of that. What I want is something like a sweep but to be able to manipulate the points that make the line during time with wrangle nodes. Basically, I would just like to get a polygon strip that I can texture as oposed to the full vdb meshing (I have uvs on my vdb, it's just a little slugish and the interpolation screws up some areas)

Cheers.

[acey195]

The best solution depends on what you need in terms of self-intersection-detection.
If you do not care about self intersection you have options:

-the Sweep SOP
-the Polywire SOP
-using your curves as profiles for a polyExtrude

If you do care about self-intersection
you may need to clean up the curves a bit, using the "Intersection Stitch" SOP for instance (talking about H16 here)

-after that you could still use the Polywire SOP with maybe a better result
-you may be able to use the PolyExpand2D (but to do that you will have to flatten your curves to P.y = 0; and raise them again after the operation)
-finally (a guy I know :P) made this: https://www.orbolt.com/asset/Twan_de_Graaf::TdG_2D_Polywire its bascially an older-less-fancy implementation of something in between PolyExpand2D and Polywire, likely more stable though.

 

Edited February 28, 2017 by acey195
clarified 2D_Polywire