I think what you are asking for is given a selection of points or edges, snap constrain this selection to a specific point, in either or any combination of X, Y or Z directions?

Please submit an RFE (Request for Enhancement) with a clear description of what you want and link to your specific thread post as well. A short avi in Soft helps and can post to this thread and then link in to the bug.

This being an older thread, Houdini 15 should see some significant enhancements to many of the issues raised above. Much of the tweak workflow should be better in 15.

I don't know if this is a good workaround bus see the attached scene files for an HDA “flatten_to_point” that takes two selections, first the points to flatten, and then a second point to constrain to.

Hello Jeff!!
How are you. Thanks a lot for your great help! yes this is exactly what I'm trying to achieve: given a selection of points, snap this selection to a specific point, in either the X, Y or Z directions. Your hip scene shows this perfectly.
Flatten to point.otl : is this an file I can use as a tool inside Houdini? What would be the way to use it?
Thanks
G

@ grendizer
run Houdini
go to Assets > Install Asset Library > find the otl on disk > (click Show Details and turn off Instantiate Asset) Accept
now place a sphere (polygon) in the scene > go inside > TAB - flatten To Point
drop the new node down and connect it to the sphere
the rest should be clear…

Flatten To Points.otl is a digital asset
you can read more about them here:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/assets/ [sidefx.com]

NOTE: .otl is the old style extention - stands for Operator Type Library….new style is .hda - stands for Houdini Digital Asset…
they are the same…but older versions of Houdini will not load .hda

Derek Mondelli
Also, Proportional modeling had a great option if you dig into it known as “consider neighborhood”. So if you were sculpting a pair of lips, the radius would understand that you didn't want to have any effect on the upper or lower lip depending on where you primarily grab from. This works great for lips, eyelids, also for adjusting the arms of a character, you never accidentally move points on the upper torso even when working with a large soft radius.

I made a Falloff SOP that supports this behaviour that you want. It's super fast (takes milliseconds for millions of polygons). I didn't have time to upload it to Orbolt yet, but it's a useful addition to create falloff weights.

grendizer
Hello Jeff!!
How are you. Thanks a lot for your great help! yes this is exactly what I'm trying to achieve: given a selection of points, snap this selection to a specific point, in either the X, Y or Z directions. Your hip scene shows this perfectly.
Flatten to point.otl : is this an file I can use as a tool inside Houdini? What would be the way to use it?
Thanks
G

I also made a Max style Flatten tool except it has the ability to compute the best fit plane for points regardless of the polygon normals, whereas Max will use face normals for the Make Planar feature, and if there are no normals (point cloud), then it will use the largest world space axis.

http://www.orbolt.com/asset/animatrix::flatten::1.00 [orbolt.com]

arctor
…

Off topic but congrats on your move to SESI 8) If I am late, don't mind me

hey guys, thanks again for the help. I'm testing all these files.
I need one tip to go forward :
How do I get the selected points into the flatten group text box and the target point text box? I tried selecting things then use the right side drop down menu but it doesn't seem to work… See attachment.
Thanks!!

I would download the Align Points HDA from Orbolt that Mantragora developed.
It is very useful and gives more control.

https://vimeo.com/119288387 [vimeo.com]

Orbolt download page
https://www.orbolt.com/asset/mantragora::hda_alignpoints [orbolt.com]

Thanks Werner. I may be using one of this 3 tools for future modelling operations.
However I would be interested in knowing how to do it with the “native” Fuse OP.
Also, is there any improvement on this in H15, without using some third party tools?
See you,
G

Back to the “freeze modelling” subject…
In XSI when you don't freeze the modelling, it takes a lot of RAM then XSI slows down a lot. Is it the same in Hou?

No.


You can lock geometry to the hip file so it doesn't recook (but the file gets bigger). Or you can cache it to the memory (Cache SOP) or to the disk File SOP.

that really depends on what's going on in the scene
if you have complex time-dependent sop network then yes, it can both, slow down and take a lot of memory, especially if you are not unloading sops

but if your network is not time dependent then you should not even need to cache the result as it will not force it to recompute unless some input have changed
but compared to Softimage with non-frozen history I haven't experienced similar types of slowdowns in houdini (again, unless time-dependent)

I had the same kind of questions in the beginning, then I realised no matter how I didn't want to, the scene is no longer all in one file (and you want it this way - believe me) which leads to a stronger relationship and even dependency on your directory structure and naming convention so you can extract value from it.

After a while freezing geometry is no longer a priority unless cooking the network is very slow you will end up exporting a file, but ultimately you will start paying attention on how you organise your scene AND your files on disk.

hope it helps

grendizer
Thanks Werner. I may be using one of this 3 tools for future modelling operations.
However I would be interested in knowing how to do it with the “native” Fuse OP.
Also, is there any improvement on this in H15, without using some third party tools?
See you,
G

If you are interested in how to build such tools, I'm in the process of making tutorial about creating Digital Assets that will go deep into WTF is going on inside of them (and I really mean inside=>INSIDE), and along the way we will create couple tools, including those 3 (in a little more extended versions). Be aware that I will use a lot of Python there. Making tools is not only connecting nodes.

Follow Twitter in second link in my signature or this => http://forums.odforce.net/topic/23654-go-nodeway/ [forums.odforce.net] <= topic on Odforce (or both) for any announcements when it will be ready.