Packing geometry with uv layout-SOP help

[magmafish]

Hi folks,

I recently saw this great tutorial from Entagma: http://www.entagma.com/houdini-17-quicktip-packing-geometry-using-the-uv-layout-sop/

It uses the UV layout SOP to pack geometry. My question is: How would I modify this technique to pack seperate words, as opposed to individual letters?

Any pointers greatly appreciated!

[howiem]

You'll need to turn the words into single [ie connected] meshes first - but it only needs to be temporary, just for the packing, then you can replace them with the originals. If the words are capitalized it should be fairly straightforward as they'll work nicely with rectangular bounding boxes. You could replace each word with a bounding box (Bound SOP), do the pack, then swap them back.

If your words are lower case (ie they don't lend themselves to a convex hull) you may find you can just boolean each word with a rectangle of bounds width but lowercase 'x' height. That'll give you a single connected mesh you can pack: a block for most of the letters, but ascenders and descenders will be taken into account. Dotted letters - i, j - may need to be dealt with differently (perhaps swap in capital letters)

[magmafish]

Thanks for the reply howiem!