Houdini 20.0 Nodes Geometry nodes

Graph Color geometry node

Assigns a unique integer attribute to non-touching components.

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Since 17.0

The Graph Color SOP assigns an integer value to each point or primitive. The coloring is built so that points or primitives that are directly connected will not have the same color.

Note

Graph coloring is a hard problem, so this does not attempt an exact solution.

Graph colorings can be very useful for OpenCL algorithms as they can split the polygons and points into non-overlapping groups that can be operated on in parallel.

Parameters

Color Attribute

The integer attribute to create, if missing, and initialize to the color value.

Connectivity

How to determine if two points or two primitives are connected. This also implicitly determines if the attribute is a point or primitive attribute.

Primitive

Two primitives are connected if they have any point in common. A primitive attribute is created.

Point

Two points are connected if they both belong to the same primitive. A point attribute is created.

Polygon Edge

Two primitives are connected if they have a shared edge. This applies only for closed polygons. A primitive attribute is created.

Note that the “map coloring” problem corresponds to this mode.

Sort Output by Color

Sort the geometry so contiguous blocks have the same graph color.

Create Workset Attributes

Create a pair of detail attributes suitable for the OpenCL SOP to run over the groups in multiple passes using the workset mode.

Worksets Begin Attr.

This array attribute stores the index of the start of each unique color in the graph.

Worksets Length Attr.

This array attribute stores the number of each unique color in the graph.

Max Iterations

The greedy graph coloring algorithm usually terminates will before this number of iterations, so this acts mostly as an upper bound in case something goes wrong.

Max Valence

Highly connected meshes, such as long hairs or tetrahedral meshes, may result in a very large number of adjacent elements. Building the internal __neighbor list may then overflow available RAM even if the number of elements is small.

The default value of 20 ensures long hairs will switch to a slower sequential algorithm. However, dense tetrahedral meshes will have a low valence but still a very high interconnectivity, so may require setting this to 0 to force a sequential approach on all elements.

Examples

FindNonInteractingAgents Example for Graph Color geometry node

This example demonstrates how the Graph Color SOP can be used to partition a crowd into groups of agents that did not interact with each other (based on a collision radius) during the simulation. When adding secondary cloth simulations to a crowd, this can be useful for avoiding unwanted collisions from nearby agents.

Geometry nodes