Efficient Help Navigation

[wixman]

Hi guys,

I've been using Houdini for a while now, and I'm starting to be able to work out how to do things I want to.

I just wondered if anyone has any tips for navigating the help files and finding what certain expressions are, what certain parameters mean, things like that.

I remember watching the 3d buzz technical effects dvd, and peter uses the hscript shell to get expression definitions... i'd just like to know stuff like that cause it's useful. It'd be nice if all these things were in the help docs really (if they are, i can't find them)

Like if I lay a vex global variables, I don't know what all the variables stand for, like 's' and 't' and I had a look through the help and couldn't find them listed.

I managed to learn Mel in Maya quite efficiently just from using the help docs and reading up on all the various commands but I'm struggling in Houdini to get a full understanding from the docs.

If anyone has any tips or anything that'd be a great help... thanks =)

[stevenong]

Hi,

These two threads, which are the same, should help. As mentioned in the threads, you don't need to script as much in Houdini. You'll use expressions regularly but that's in the help or accessible through the textport. There is an Expression Cookbook as well: http://localhost:48626/ref/expression_cookbook (copy and paste in the Houdini Help Browser)

For VEX, there is a Help section dedicated to it. Check out the Help menu > Houdini Help > VEX and VEX Functions. I encourage you to search through both SESI & this forum for more VEX usage/code/examples.

Please post more questions when you have them.

Cheers!

steven