Instancing Geometry

[thrasherstudios77]

Aloha

I am trying to mirror over a duplicate of my geometry so I can change the the shape of one side and have it update on the duplicated side. To try and figure this out I have started off with a basic object.

Create a box

Used the delete SOP to slice the box in half

from here I have tried all kinds of things to get this to work

First I tried the mirror SOP. It mirrored over the geometry just fine but changes from the original don't influence the duplicated side, points, edges ect.

I have also tried to use the duplicate and copy SOPs to no avail. I did a search on this forum and got a post about how to do this, but I could not get it to work.

Could somebody give me the procedure of SOPs I need to use to get this working.

Mahalo

Benjamin

[mike]

nothing wrong, open a preview window on the "mirror sop" RMB

and put a "edit sop" between "delete" and "mirror" -> display flag on "edit"

and all works fine.

[thrasherstudios77]

Mike

Thats funny I was just thinking of doing that. I guess I got held back by trying to do things in Houdini the way I do them in other packages, Houdini never is lacking in tricks and work arounds, god I love this program.

Now back to modeling

Thank you for the quick reply

Mahalo

[thrasherstudios77]

BTW

I was wondering how to grid and point snap in Houdini. I would like to make sure that my geometry is directly at 0 0 0, so it will mirror over perfectly. Atleast in other apps it is almost crucial to make sure when mirror that the initial side is directly in the center of the scene, maybe Houdini doesn't need this. Anyways take it easy

Ben

[stevenong]

Hey there,

You can turn on the construction plane by clicking on the "Grid" icon at the bottom of the viewport. It's the icon to the right of the geometry display(wireframe, shaded, etc) button.

With that on, you can orient it to the X, Y, Z axis either by Right+Click+Hold on the Construction & selecting "Center c-plane around World X/Y/Z axis" or by typing c + x/y/z.

Once done, you can turn on Snapping either by clicking on the Snap button(button to the left of the down arrow in the top left of the viewport) or type Ctrl + j.

Of course, you would want to choose what you would like to snap to. To do that, you can either Right+Click+Hold on the Snap button & select Snap Options... or type Ctrl + k.

You don't have to worry about the points not being flushed to 0. After you're done modeling, you can use an Edit SOP to select the points, turn on the Construction plane & Ctrl+RMB on any selected point & select "Flatten selection to c-plane".

I hope I have not confused you.

Cheers!

steven

[thrasherstudios77]

Thank you steve for the reply

No that made alot of sense. I was also wondering how you would go about snapping a vert to another vert, or snapping a vert to a curve, or snapping the translation handle to a vert, curve, or the grid. I come from a background in Maya and this type of snapping ability is indispensable when modelling. I have looked over the snapping options but don't really understand them.

[danteA]

Indeed, the mirror sop doesn't restrict you to having a centre axis although it's probably a good idea anyways. Check out the Origin parameter in the mirror sop.

For snapping, look at the snapping options. Once you have snapping on, moving the handle (say from within an edit sop) will snap to what you want.