RickWork Posted February 23, 2006 Share Posted February 23, 2006 hello, I'm trying to have a Wave Chop perturb a grid like I can do with the point sop. I tried using a channel sop to read the data directly from a wave chop but that won't work as I thought. So I created a chopnet that has a geometry chop to fetch the grids points and I'm using a copy chop with the wave chop. I don't think this is what I'm after either. In any case, I'm just trying to mimic in chops how i can create an animated sine wave on a grid like I can do with the point sop. I have a attached a sample hip file to show you were I did not succeed Thanks! /Rick Channel_Sop.hip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted February 24, 2006 Share Posted February 24, 2006 Here's what I came up with. Cheers! PS. To animate the file, you can just animate the Wave CHOP parameters. eg. $F/24 in the Phase parameter. geo_wave_chop.hip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 24, 2006 Author Share Posted February 24, 2006 Hey Edward, that helps. Seems I gooffed my chopnet setup royallly! Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deecue Posted February 25, 2006 Share Posted February 25, 2006 hey rick, don't know exactly what you're going for or what you're doing, but a while back i was having some fun with chops and custom displacement shaders.. i was able to get a good amount of detail and control while displacing grids in very neato ways.. and it was pretty fast too.. anyways, seems like you've got what you're looking for but i just wanted to throw that out there.. hope all is well up in NY, dave Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 26, 2006 Author Share Posted February 26, 2006 hey rick,don't know exactly what you're going for or what you're doing, but a while back i was having some fun with chops and custom displacement shaders.. i was able to get a good amount of detail and control while displacing grids in very neato ways.. and it was pretty fast too.. anyways, seems like you've got what you're looking for but i just wanted to throw that out there.. hope all is well up in NY, dave 25068[/snapback] Hey Dave, Currently, I'm just trying to wrap up a last minute project and am getting my butt kicked with cooking expressions on tens of thousands of objects. I thought chops might evaluate faster. Still having problems with the chops route though. sigh, gonna be a long weekend. Things are good in NY otherwise. /Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted February 26, 2006 Share Posted February 26, 2006 On "tens of thousands of objects", is this rendering? Is instancing a possible solution? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 26, 2006 Author Share Posted February 26, 2006 On "tens of thousands of objects", is this rendering? Is instancing a possible solution? 25093[/snapback] I am using instancing but I'm only instancing non-deforming objects. I don't think we can instance objects that are deforming can we? I have a waveChop /sin expression deforming many many line sops. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted February 26, 2006 Share Posted February 26, 2006 Are they all deforming differently at the SOP level? If they're deforming the same at the SOP level, then instancing can be used. Are at least some of the computations shared at the CHOP level? I take it then you are sharing the same CHOP network between multiple objects? Also make sure that you're not running out of memory (ie. over 2GB per hscript/houdini process if you're running the 32-bit build). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 26, 2006 Author Share Posted February 26, 2006 Are they all deforming differently at the SOP level? Are at least some of the computations shared at the CHOP level? I take it then you are sharing the same CHOP network between multiple objects? 25096[/snapback] The file that I'm working on right now (the really big monster) is using a vex ripple sop (direction x & z) to deform these lines via a lattice. They are all deforming differently but it's all based off the lattice. I could not get the wavechop to do what I'm doing with the above. ;( In theory is the chops supposed to compute faster than say a point sop? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted February 26, 2006 Share Posted February 26, 2006 I guess it depends on your expressions. Various people here have done tests and found VEX very efficient compared to the Point SOP. If you have more than one cpu core, you might even try turning on multi-threaded in the VEX Ripple to see if it improves the speed. However, this only helps if you have sufficiently large lattice geometry which doesn't sound like your situation though. My guess is that VEX would be more efficient than CHOPs. However, it depends on what you're doing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 26, 2006 Author Share Posted February 26, 2006 Thanks Edward. I think I have a decent workflow now. For my non-deforming objects, I'm using point instancing. This helps greatly. For the deforming objects, I have line sops, and an object merge of a tube sop piped into a switch sop and then finally the infamous copy sop At render time the switch (via pre-render script) enables the tube to be visible and then off again once the render is complete. The obviously helps me with viewport interactivity. Just for kicks, to speed up the ifd process, I wrote out a non-deformed tube to a bgeo file. At the object level of the deforming objects I have set the render options to read geometry from file which is pointing to this tube.bgeo file. I think this should work. I'll fire off a test render in the next 4 hours. I think I'm ready to rock and roll and crank out this spot now ! whew! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickWork Posted February 27, 2006 Author Share Posted February 27, 2006 Well I'm rendering now and everything seems to have gone as planned as my renders just blaze on the farm. Wow, Point instancing is the best thing since sliced bread! Thanks for your feedback. /Rick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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