beginner questions re attributes/parameters

[thesejm]

Hello,

hope someone can point me right here. houdini beginner. I'm struggling a bit with some concepts, I tried to make some rocks scattered across a grid. 
so a very simple network, sphere goes in to a vop with some noise to make it look like a rock, then it's copied to points. 
I understand I can do for instance attribute randomize on pscale etc. but how do I get at the parameters in the vop, like frequency and offset etc. 
I tried to bind export and there was a node called attribute from parameter or something, promoting only brings them out of the attribvop but
I want to access and manipulate these parameters later on. I think I'm missing some fundamental understanding of stuff here.
can someone explain to me like i'm five how i'm supposed to think. 

thanks! /S

[Aizatulin]

Hi,

I think for this you will need copystamp or foreach. In some cases copytopoints will work with variants aswell. But you pay the price with performance. Copytopoints is much faster.

Here is an example comparing three methods, where boxes are copied to sphere points and bended by an point attribute (on the sphere).

The variant method is by far the fastest, but it is using a different approach compared to the both other methods (which are equivalent). You can use the performance monitor to visualize the difference.

 

copystamp_alternative_methods.hipnc

[eikonoklastes]

You don't need to use VOPs for noise. There has been excellent noise support in SOPs for a while now.

Here is a typical For Loop setup to vary noise on copies, and wrapped in a Compile Block, which provides excellent performance even for a very large number of copies (scene file attached).

Random Rocks.hiplc

[thesejm]

oh wow, that looks very nice, i'll play around with all of this. thanks guys!