Houdini 20.0 Nodes Geometry nodes

Table Import geometry node

Reads a CSV file creating point per row.

Since 11.0

This node will read in a csv (comma separated value) file, such as output from spreadsheet applications, and generate a point for each line of the csv file. The position and attributes of the resulting point cloud can be populated by the columns of the file.

Parameters

File

The name of the file to read. The file is a plain text file. Each line of the file is a sequence of values separated by separators. The first value is column 0, the next column 1, etc.

Because the separator often varies between files, the first five lines are read to deduce if the file has a header line and what the separator should be. This sytem can be confused, especially with files that have only one column.

Max Rows

You may want to only load a portion to provide fast verification that the parameters are set properly, since some data sets are very large. Restricting the number of lines read can speed up the processing significantly.

Number of Attributes

Each specified attribute will be created and populated from the values in the file. Out of bound columns will be treated as 0 or the empty string. The special attribute P refers to point position and is 3 floats long. Pw refers to the point weight and is a single float.

Column Number

Where to start reading this attribute’s values from. The first value on a line is column 0, the second column 1, etc.

Translator

Some simple conversions from likely external formats to more useful coordinates for manipulation in SOPs are provided. Note that SOPs itself allows considerable additional translation, including by creating your own python SOPs to do the post processing.

Lat/Long to Sphere

The first two columns are taking to be the latitude and longitude coordinates. They are then translated into a y-up unit sphere’s surface.

Date to Seconds

The value is interpreted as a string-date. The Format parameter describes the format in a fashion accepted by Python’s time.strptime (http://docs.python.org/library/time.html). The default value of %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S will correctly process something like 1999-03-25 12:55:21

The time is then converted into epoch time, ie, the number of seconds since 1970, which is convenient for computing deltas.

TIP: If you want to find the maximum/minimum time in a procedural manner use the AttribPromote SOP to promote to a Detail attribute.

Name

The name of the attribute to create. The internal names P and Pw will affect the point Position and weight respectively.

Attribute Type

The kind of attribute to create. The input file will attempt to convert to this type. If it the input is invalid, it will silently be converted to 0 or the empty string.

Attribute Length

The length of the attribute to create. This number of columns will be read from the input row. Note that with the Lat/Long translator, the length should be 3 but only two columns are used in generating the result.

Geometry nodes