Since Houdini always is kind of a struggle for me, I avoided it long time and still do in a way but nonetheless I don't wanna be bigoted and so I'm giving Houdini a new chance every 4-5 once in a while.

This time I was playing with boolean and once again a problem occured, I'm struggling with quite frequently in Houdini. Houdini doesn't let me create nodes the way I want.
I have a geonode with two primitive objects inside. Now I want to create a booleannode and hook up my primitive objects. This is unfortunatley not possible. When I want to create a booleannode, Houdini always forces me through this annoying creation assistend, this annoying yellow bar at the bottom “…select this and that geometry and press enter to continue…” you know what I mean.

Is there a way to deactivate this assistent somewhere in the preferences or so because that bugs me a lot.

I also have a similar problem when it comes to adding a selection of points/edges/primitives to a group. I want to create a groupnode, select, for examples, some edges and add them to the pattern. So far I havn't found a way to do so. The only way I know is to select some edges and then create a new groupnode with this pattern but this is not what I want/need in most of the cases.

I hope you experienced houdiniusers know some alternatives for these problems that suit my way of working better.

Welcome back Korny Klown2.

Before we get into your questions I highly recommend that you take part in the “make Houdini a great modeller” thread we have going.

Take a look at the webpage McNistor has created, linked on the first post of the thread, and post some thoughts. In general the concepts are take what is good of SoftImage and integrate them into Houdini. Grouping and selections are currently being addressed, then modelling to come soon.

Definitely worth a read.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=31040&start=0 [sidefx.com]

It might be the best place to get some of your suggestions in

When I am so nicely and particularly invited to the thread I will definitely stop by.

Korny Klown2
Since Houdini always is kind of a struggle for me, I avoided it long time and still do in a way but nonetheless I don't wanna be bigoted and so I'm giving Houdini a new chance every 4-5 once in a while.

Welcome back, again then. Just curious, which modelling software are you familiar with?

I have a geonode with two primitive objects inside. Now I want to create a booleannode and hook up my primitive objects.

I think the best way to do that right now is to move your mouse into the Network View pane and do TAB > Cookie and wire them up.

I want to create a groupnode, select, for examples, some edges and add them to the pattern.

This sort of like a grammar problem of whether you do “noun verb” or “verb noun”. Houdini's viewport grammar is the former: “noun verb”. That is, you first choose what you operate on, then you choose how you want to operate on it.

Versions prior to Houdini 9 actually used the other way (“verb noun”, ie. choose operation, then the selection). The problem with this approach was that it required an extra step in between two consecutive operations. Say you polyextruded a polygon, and now you want to transform it. Doing it in Houdini 8 required:

1. TAB > PolyExtrude
   
2. Select polygon
   
3. Accept the selection
   
4. Now move the handle to extrude
   
5. TAB > Transform
   
6. Accept the selection (since the current works for us)
   
7. Now move the handle to transform it
   
   In the Houdini 9 or later, these steps became one shorter:
   
8. Hit ‘s’ if not already in Select or Show Handle mode
   
9. Select polygon
   
10. TAB > PolyExtrude
    
11. Now move the handle to extrude
    
12. TAB > Transform (no need to change the selection)
    
13. Now move the handle to transform it
    
    
    I believe that the “noun verb” mode of modeling also comes from other software packages as well.

edward
Just curious, which modelling software are you familiar with?

Ok, a quick biographical rundown:
In school I started learning 3d on Cinema 4D but after school I changed to Maya and ever since then I'm using Maya, so Maya is the modeling software I'm most familiar with. But during school I made this internship as a digital compositor so I learned Nuke there and that's where I fell in love with procedual, nodebased technologie. So from that day on I dreamed of a 3D software that works like Nuke. Then, after a while I heard of Houdini, not the first time but the first time I payed attention to it and realized that Houdini is actually right what I was looking for. I immediately downloaded the apprentice version but then I noticed working with Houdini isn't as much fun as I expected it to be.

edward
I think the best way to do that right now is to move your mouse into the Network View pane and do TAB > Cookie and wire them up.

Perfect, right what I was looking for. Is there a specific reason why it is called boolean in the 3d viewport and cookie in the network pane?

I want to create a groupnode, select, for examples, some edges and add them to the pattern.

This sort of like a grammar problem of whether you do “noun verb” or “verb noun”. Houdini's viewport grammar is the former: “noun verb”. That is, you first choose what you operate on, then you choose how you want to operate on it.

Versions prior to Houdini 9 actually used the other way (“verb noun”, ie. choose operation, then the selection). The problem with this approach was that it required an extra step in between two consecutive operations.

But why doesn't Houdini offer both ways, so the user can choose which way he/she wants to go.
That's something, for example, I'm pretty used to in Nuke. In Nuke you can EITHER go “noun verb” OR “verb noun” whatever suits your individual preferences.
But as MartybNz suggested, I will bring up my suggestions in the thread about making Houdini a great modeler.

Korny Klown2
But why doesn't Houdini offer both ways, so the user can choose which way he/she wants to go.
That's something, for example, I'm pretty used to in Nuke. In Nuke you can EITHER go “noun verb” OR “verb noun” whatever suits your individual preferences.

Hmm, isn't that what Preferences -> Objects and Geometry -> Use Existing Selection to Complete Action does?

Korny Klown2
Perfect, right what I was looking for. Is there a specific reason why it is called boolean in the 3d viewport and cookie in the network pane?

Boolean is a shelf tool, cookie is the node tool. You can get to the cookie node from the viewport too, but you can't get the boolean tool from the network editor - see attached screen grab. The methodology breaks down like this :

• Tab over viewport accesses both Shelf Tools and node tools.
  
  Tab over the Network editor only access the node tools.
  
  Anytime you tab-create a node up over the viewport it will try to help you with those instructions. For you, don't do this!
  
  Shelf tools are macros, higher level tools that contain the lower level nodes with some parameters set.
  
  Boolean is more confusing than other shelf tools, it is almost the same as cookie, so it more confusing than the Twist, Bend, Taper & Linear Taper under the Deform shelf tab. Those four shelf tools all are the Twist nodal twist with different parameters set.

eetu
Hmm, isn't that what Preferences -> Objects and Geometry -> Use Existing Selection to Complete Action does?

I had totally forgotten about that! My bad.

eetu

Korny Klown2
But why doesn't Houdini offer both ways, so the user can choose which way he/she wants to go.
That's something, for example, I'm pretty used to in Nuke. In Nuke you can EITHER go “noun verb” OR “verb noun” whatever suits your individual preferences.

Hmm, isn't that what Preferences -> Objects and Geometry -> Use Existing Selection to Complete Action does?

No unfortunatelly it doesn't do the trick.

Anytime you tab-create a node up over the viewport it will try to help you with those instructions. For you, don't do this!

Well, unfortunatelly I have to. Most nodes are only accessable this way.

Korny Klown2
Well, unfortunatelly I have to. Most nodes are only accessable this way.

Which nodes? All nodes are available via the network.

I think it worth putting in an RFE to ask that the ‘help’ system be disabled via a preference; this will enhance the viewport workflow. I know that things can catch the eye for some people when they want to just work

MartybNz

Korny Klown2
Well, unfortunatelly I have to. Most nodes are only accessable this way.

Which nodes? All nodes are available via the network.

Edgeloop for example. Ok, actually it's not a node on it's own but in my opinion it should be.
Boolean for another example, not available in the network pane. Although I find that boolean and cookie (cookiecutter ) are quite similar, I heard that they work slightly different so if I explicitly have the need for a boolean I can't access that one in the network pane.
There are probably more but I don't know all of them.

Hi, Korny,
you do understand that boolean is cookie sop?
you can check it yourself, just create “boolean” from view pane and look what was created in the network pane its cookie sop with name “boolean1”

Boolean for another example, not available in the network pane.

owlYzarc
Hi, Korny,
you do understand that boolean is cookie sop?
you can check it yourself, just create “boolean” from view pane and look what was created in the network pane its cookie sop with name “boolean1”

Oh now I get this, ok, I misread this in another thread here but now I see….oh man, Houdini will kill me one day. It's so confusing. Somehow like the software refuses to be used, like it doesn't want to be used. :roll:

It's like speaking a language - you need to know how to construct a sentence with letters, words, grammar and then you can speak and write it. Until then it make no sense and everyone just babbles

Houdini isn't “speaking” Maya, Max, C4D etc.

Edit:

Stay inspired, check out Tom's work. After many years with Max, this after 6 months of Houdini:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=31196 [sidefx.com]

Hey Korny Klown2 I read your posts in another Topics before ,You have too many problem with Houdini ,I think you right and you should work with another 3D Software ,Because Houdini is more complex and Hard to work :wink:

Joker386
Hey Korny Klown2 I read your posts in another Topics before ,You have too many problem with Houdini ,I think you right and you should work with another 3D Software ,Because Houdini is more complex and Hard to work :wink:

Nah Joker - Korny is now getting the Houdini groove-on This Apprentice forum area is to ask questions, not to turn to discourage. thanks!

Joker386
Hey Korny Klown2 I read your posts in another Topics before ,You have too many problem with Houdini ,I think you right and you should work with another 3D Software ,Because Houdini is more complex and Hard to work :wink:

But why can't we address these problems, since I'm not the only one having them.
You said you read my posts in other threads before so maybe you've read my thoughts on Why Houdini isn't the leader? [sidefx.com].
Ok, my frustrationlevel at that time was very high so the words I've chosen were probably a bit to rough but in cunclusion:
Could it be that Houdini isn't the leader because it rather let's people switch to other softwares instead of addressing it's problems. Call me a visionary or a fool, that's basically the same thing from diffent points of view, but I see a potential in Houdini which it doesn't fully exhaust at the moment.

Korny is now getting the Houdini groove-on

As I said, I'm trying but it's still a bit painfull.
During the last year I probably made a progress of 1% of getting my head around Houdini. That leaves me only 99 years to go.

Korny Klown2
Could it be that Houdini isn't the leader because it rather let's people switch to other softwares instead of addressing it's problems. Call me a visionary or a fool, that's basically the same thing from diffent points of view, but I see a potential in Houdini which it doesn't fully exhaust at the moment.

That's the difference between just thinking of it and implementing it.

You've thought of the benefits of doing these changes, such as - less frustration for some users, more potential marketshare etc but have you thought of the negatives? i.e. upsetting your user base of current customers and users, using the companies resources on areas that most users might not care about and thus not implementing new important features to compete with the competition, and, the technical hurdles implementing such things because of the history of the program.

Running a company is a battle of choosing pros and cons.

Korny Klown2
This time I was playing with boolean and once again a problem occured, I'm struggling with quite frequently in Houdini. Houdini doesn't let me create nodes the way I want.
I have a geonode with two primitive objects inside. Now I want to create a booleannode and hook up my primitive objects. This is unfortunatley not possible. When I want to create a booleannode, Houdini always forces me through this annoying creation assistend, this annoying yellow bar at the bottom “…select this and that geometry and press enter to continue…” you know what I mean.

The request is to have the Boolean work with only a single input? Then auto-detect the two input manifold pieces of geometry then boolean them together.

You can create an asset wrapper around the Cookie SOP to do this. See the attached hip file for one such example.

Is there a way to deactivate this assistent somewhere in the preferences or so because that bugs me a lot.

I take it you are tab-typing the node in the viewport. If you do this, you are activating the python script that adds behaviours in the viewport. The Boolean tool inherits the default tool behaviour which is to make two selections, one for set A geometry and one for set B geometry and then will wire the two inputs in to Boolean to do the operation for you.

If you just want one boolean with one input and expects there to be just two manifold objects, then you can modify the tool behaviour to do this. Again see the same attached hip file. The tool name is Boolean Merge. That is what I named it. So you have your two manifold objects in a single SOP, tab-type boolean merge and hit enter to complete the one-stop boolean operation.

Obviously this example is very simple and can be expanded upon to handle a lot more options such as multiple manifold objects. If you peer inside the asset you can see how it's being done.

Fyi, the asset is in Houdini's Embedded library. To save it to disk, RMB on the node and choose the Operator Type Manager and save a copy to disk.
or
RMB on the node, open the Edit OpType Properties and in the first folder at the top change the Embedded string to a path on disk. If this path is in your $HOME/houdini13.0/otls directory, then it will be present for every session if you wish.

Please read up on managing assets in Houdini.

I also have a similar problem when it comes to adding a selection of points/edges/primitives to a group. I want to create a groupnode, select, for examples, some edges and add them to the pattern. So far I havn't found a way to do so. The only way I know is to select some edges and then create a new groupnode with this pattern but this is not what I want/need in most of the cases.

All SOP Geometry nodes have an option to re-enter the tool to refine the selection.

Select your node you wish to change the input selection.
Check to see that your viewport is set to that node (upper left of viewport). If not hit Enter in the viewport to enter that SOP's state.
Hit the backquote key to re-enter the SOP. This will unwire the SOP and give you it's current selection to add or remove from. Use Shift, Shift-Ctrl or Ctrl to toggle, add or remove from your selection.
When done hit Enter and your SOP now has your new selection.

This works for the Group SOP when you want to edit-refine the group contents.


Here's a workflow tip.
If this is a critical step, copy/paste the SOP and pull a version off to the side. Then try another selection with no concern. If you want to go back just unwire and rewire the previous node. It's just nodes.
You can copy and paste off as many versions as you want. If you want to switch between them, add a Switch SOP.

You should have absolutely no fear to experiment at any point of your network. Just copy off a version of the nodes to go back to and forge on. A node that isn't evaluated has a minimal overhead and won't slow you down one bit.

MartybNz

Joker386
Hey Korny Klown2 I read your posts in another Topics before ,You have too many problem with Houdini ,I think you right and you should work with another 3D Software ,Because Houdini is more complex and Hard to work :wink:

Nah Joker - Korny is now getting the Houdini groove-on This Apprentice forum area is to ask questions, not to turn to discourage. thanks!

I have another meant of the last reply for Korny Klown2 and I think he got it !

However ,thanks for your reminder about Houdini Forum :wink: