I'm aware most of the Houdini users wont use Houdini for broadcast titles and such. I think with the recent price reduction Houdini might gain more diverse user base. I for example do mostly tv broadcast work, and would love for Houdini to be more motion graphics/broadcast friendly.

I do some tests in Apprentice of the most common things I do for commercials and such.

Titles are one of them. I am trying out combinations with Font sop. Some problems:

1.The font selector in Font SOP is a list (table) that is pretty unusable for 100 fonts+ most people doing motion graphics work have.

I would love to have a sort of a browser with font preview.

2.I would love to have group per letter/word right out of the font SOP.

well you have the font manager window that has a good concept, at least for me. when you select the font and hit alt+v you can see the font preview in gPlay window.. although it is a bit buggy on my computer, but maybe it is because of known ati and openGL issues.
Still your suggestions are good…

Try this, it works on windows2000…. not sure about linux or xp or whatever

You can put in any sample text you like and then browse all your fonts using the timeline. When you find a font you like just press the “what font is this?” button.

It wouldn't be too difficult to get it to automatically stick down a font sop with the choosen font in it as well.

Simon. This rocks…

Very nice. I guess i should be thinking more and posting less .

Is there a way to filter out only .ttf files?

try changing the execute(“uls”) bit to execute(“uls *.ttf”)
:wink:

The only thing you need to watch is there are some fonts that Houdini doesn't like and rather than just throwing an error Houdini will totally bail out. Not sure what to do about that other than if you find a font that does that report it to Sesi supprt and maybe they can improve the error trapping.

Oh yeah, the arg bit should say $F-1, rather than just $F, otherwise you will never see your first font in the list. Which on my system crahes houdini so its handy that it doesn't, but for you that may not be the case…

Here's one all fixed up.

Yep. Works perfectly. I guess some fonts could potentionaly crash Houdini, for now though I have had some luck and everything works perfectly.

What I am thinking of making is an advanced type generator for motion graphics. I should be an otl at the end.

It should provide groups for letters and words. It should also offset text curves with automatic overlap resoultion (of course options for all) and planar face tesselation for beveling and extrusion. Do you as expirienced Houdini user think this is doable?

It should idealy emulate XSI curve to solid as much as possible. Its the most featured solid from curves generator I used.

Well with Houdini generally everything is possible, it just depends how many hoops you need to jump through.

Adding groups for words would be doable using the arg expression and a bit of math with $PR and the arg count.

Offseting curves is possible with the extrude sop - just don't output any faces. That has overlap detection and resolution built in.

Bevelling and extrusion are all handled by poly extrude and the extrude sop.

I would guess you can probably do everything you need with one more partition sop and an extrude sop, just add a second input for the profile of the bevel.