Control the flow of channels through a CHOPnet.
The Switch CHOP allows you to control the flow of channels through a CHOPnet. It selects one of the input CHOPs by index and copies it exactly. This is useful for selecting one of several “gestures” or actions. Only one input chop can be selected at a time.
Inputs are indexed starting at 0, so that the first input is 0, the
second is 1, and so on.
If the First Input Is Index parameter is enabled, the first input is
used as the “switch” and the remaining inputs will be selection choices.
In this case, the second input will be indexed as 0, the third as 1, the
fourth as 2, and so on (the Switch input CHOP is not indexed). The index
value is determined by evaluating the first channel in the first input
at the current frame. Only integer indices are used; fractional indices
will be rounded down to the closest integer.
If the index is less than 0, then the index will be interpreted to be 0.
If the index is greater than the number of input chops, the last input
CHOP is selected.
Parameters
Switch
| First Input Is Index | If on, use the first input CHOP’s first channel to determine which input to select. |
| Index | The input index to use if First Input Is Index is off. |
Common
Some of these parameters may not be avaiable on all CHOP nodes.
| Scope | To determine which channels get affected, some CHOPs have a scope string. Patterns can be used in the scope, for example The following are examples of possible channel name matching options:
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| Sample Rate Match | The Sample Rate Match Options handle cases where multiple input CHOPs’ sample rates are different.
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| Units | The units for which time parameters are specified. For example, you can specify the amount of time a lag should last for in seconds (default), frames (at the Houdini FPS), or samples (in the CHOP’s sample rate). Note When you change the Units parameter, it does not convert the existing parameters to the new units. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Time Slice | Time Slicing is a feature which boosts cooking performance and reduces memory usage. Traditionally, CHOPs calculate the channel over its entire frame range. If the channel does need to be evaluated every frame, then cooking the entire range of the channel is unnecessary. It is more efficient to calculate only the fraction of the channel that is needed. This fraction is known as a Time Slice. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Unload | Causes the memory consumed by a CHOP to be released after it is cooked and the data passed to the next CHOP. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Export Prefix | The Export prefix is prepended to CHOP channel names to determine where to export to. For example, if the CHOP channel was named Note You can leave the Export Prefix blank, but then your CHOP track names need to be absolute paths, such as | ||||||||||||||||||
| Graph Color | Every CHOP has this option. Each CHOP gets a default color assigned for display in the Graph port, but you can override the color in the Common page under Graph Color. There are 36 RGB color combinations in the Palette. | ||||||||||||||||||
| Graph Color Step | When the graph displays the animation curves and a CHOP has two or more channels, this defines the difference in color from one channel to the next, giving a rainbow spectrum of colors. |
Examples that use this node
| Example for | Example name | |
|---|---|---|
| Vector | AverageSpeed | Load | Launch |
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| Gas Up Res | UpresRetime | Load | Launch |
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