Grouping Collinear Points on a Polyline

[Braddish]

Hi there, new Houdini user here (couple months in).

I'd like to group some collinear points along a polyline. And when I say polyline, I mean an edge I created using a curve with a primitive type of "polygon".

 

Is there a simple way of doing this procedurally?

 

I plan on running a polywire on this, then beveling edges at these points, but I would like to avoid beveling the edges on the collinear ones.

Just a warning that I am an artist with limited scripting knowledge (I am beginning to learn a bit of vex and have done a small amount of python before). If the answer involves a ton of code, there is a good chance it will be lost on me 

 

Thank you

 

[nuki]

here you go, i commented the code so it should be really straightforward. you can control the grouping based on their facing ratio with the threshold slider.

group_collinear.hiplc

Edited April 4, 2020 by nuki

[Braddish]

Beautiful!
Thank you nuki!

I had some errors opening your file, so I copied the code out into a new file and it works great. It will take me some time to decipher and fully understand how this is working, but it is just about the right complexity for me to dig into. And the comments really help a lot, I probably wouldn't figure it out without them 

 

[nuki]

if you wanna get around vex - one super helpful thing in the editor is the quick lookup on functions. if the cursor is on a function you can just press f1 and it brings up the respective docs page

 

Edit: oh yeah, the error on open probably is a licensing thing (I'm running houdini indie)

Edited April 5, 2020 by nuki