Understanding PDG

[haggi]

I think I need help to understand the whole pdg process in Houdini. I've done a lot of simpler tasks, doing simulations, meshing, all with static work items. Now I have a more or less simple problem: I have three characters and every character has some props like clothes, shoes, wapons. What I want to do is to do some work with each of these props. The props of every character are packed. And now I have one with 4 props another with 8 props and so on. My naive approach is to setup an top network where I first use a wedge node to iterate over the characers. In a delete node I delete all which are not the current one. Then I unpack the content of this character to get the props and based on these props I want to create new items. In a wedge node I make the number of wedges depending on the number of props in the unpacked character. Now I would expect that the wedge node created a different number of items for every character, but it does not. It always creates the same amount of items.  In the images you can see the simple example network and my top setup. It seems that I have a basic misunderstanding of the pdg workflow, maybe anyone is able to enlighten me, thanks for having a look. Example hipfile is attached. What I expect is that the ROP Geometry node writes a different number of elements to disc, first 4, then 6 and finally 8 elements, but it does not.

From what I understand the PDG workflow this is called dynamit item creation because I do not know how many items I need later in the graph, but I am unable to create such a dynamic graph.

pdgdynamic.hiplc

Edited April 30, 2021 by haggi