Trying to do a specific parent [SOLVED]

[chrissweeny]

Hi everyone, I'm using Houdini 16 and I'm trying to parent a tube to the inside of the mouth of a dragon character that is animated.

My goal is for the dragon to breath fire and I want to use the tube as an emission source object. I've parented the dragon and tube together but I need the tube locked onto the dragon's mouth. At the moment when the dragon moves it head, the tube isn't animated with it. 

I need the tube to inherit the animation of the dragon's mouth. 

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to achieve this? I'm guessing I need to constrain the tube to a section of the mouth?

Thanks in advance,

Chris (AUS)

Edited October 6, 2017 by chrissweeny

[boby]

Take a look at the Rivet tool

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/obj/rivet

 

boby

[Sepu]

You can also use the points constraints. 

[3iart]

delete all but that point, cache it out, copy tube to that point.

[chrissweeny]

Thanks for the info, I really appreciate the help! I'll start looking into how to use them. 

[vineet]

you can try select a point on his mouth where you want to attach the tube and keep only that point using blast sop(delete non selected) and then pack you tube geometry and then simply use a transform node and call transform values from that point....or use point vop or wrangle to apply point P values to tube...for wrangle u can use @P=point(1,"P",@ptnum); where your tube geo is connected on the first input and you point is connected to the second input...hope this will help thanks....

[chrissweeny]

Thanks for the detailed explanation Vineet. I got the Rivet tool to do what I needed. But I've written down your method and might use it in the future if the Rivet tool doesn't do the trick. 

Cheers!

[vineet]

Rivet tool is best for that kind of work but some time i feel a bit complicated with that......thanks