Creating Custom Uis With Geometry

[Vormav]

Hey guys. I've had my first bit of experience with rigging recently. I like what I've seen so far, but I have a couple questions about one particular aspect to it: custom UIs.

Now, with all of the tools that come built into Houdini, it probably isn't completely necessary to build custom UIs for rigs using 3d geometry. But I'm sure that in some cases, doing so could still have its advantages.

I've done some test setups with this, and it's not really all that difficult to setup. The way I'm handling it right now is to simply parent my UI geometry beneath the camera. This works fine, but with a couple annoying little issues; for one, the orientation of the geometry doesn't update while you're panning the camera. It snaps into place as soon as you've stopped moving, but it won't update while you're moving. Not exactly a huge issue - it's just a little awkard having the UI controls 'jump' around when you're panning. And second, when you're using a camera to view the scene, the camera is cropped in the viewer according to its pixel aspect ratio. That's fine if I'm to the point of setting up a camera for rendering, but not too desirable while animating a character.

Are there any simple ways of fixing these issues? Or maybe a better way of handling this?

Thanks

[sibarrick]

For the second part why not just have two cameras parented together with different aspect ratios. Then just toggle between them.

Either that or another UI widget that changes the ratio on the fly.

[Vormav]

For the second part why not just have two cameras parented together with different aspect ratios. Then just toggle between them.

Either that or another UI widget that changes the ratio on the fly.

27463[/snapback]

I guess handling it with a UI widget isn't such a bad idea. I just tried tying that into the scale ratio on a rectangular UI widget, which works...the camera responds really awkwardly, but I guess that'll have to do... unless of course there happens to be some way of querying the dimensions of a viewer pane?

[Jason]

I guess handling it with a UI widget isn't such a bad idea. I just tried tying that into the scale ratio on a rectangular UI widget, which works...the camera responds really awkwardly, but I guess that'll have to do... unless of course there happens to be some way of querying the dimensions of a viewer pane?

27505[/snapback]

You can query the viewer pane with hscript commands, yes, but one thing you might consider is having a subnet containing a Fetch Object to fetch the transform of the camera and display your UI in there. In this way you don't need to use a heirarchical relationship with your camera, and instead sit this node quietly on the side of your network.