The title is self-explanatory. I hope…
In XSI, an object center is just like another component - you select it and manipulate it.
How does one achieve that in Houdini?
I've submitted a RFE a while ago but so far did not see the light. Hoping it'll be addressed in a future version, because currently, even if there's a workaround, it's not very obvious.

Hi, have you tried using the pivot point on a transform node? Shortcut (in viewport) is the Insert key. There is also a “Move centroid to origin” which I sometimes find useful. Or am I misunderstanding the question?

hope that helps
Rob

No, that's not it.
I want to move the coordinates of an object while its geometry stays in place. All this happening at SOP level, while adding an Edit node (or other), I don't want to change anything at Object level regarding pivot.

Right now this process can be achieved manually, but needless to say, this is beyond ridiculous to deal with in a practical setting:
create a box, go into SOP and select all its points (or other components), move the geometry one unit in +Y and then go to OBJ level and move the object -1 on Y. You'll get the cube with its geometry in the same place but the object's origin (center) shifted to (0,-1,0).

In Softimage, “center” is just like any other component (point, edge, poly) and can transform it accordingly.

For some reason, in Houdini, even after doing this manually when going back at SOP level the transform gizmo will still be located in the origin, because Houdini has no concept of “center of geometry” positioned gizmo as a toggle.

The manually obtained instance can also be obtained with Houdini's pivot, but I don't want to use pivot for reasons I won't discuss here (unless you insist, riggers and animators will know why) but even then, there's no way that I know of to move around the pivot in viewport.

And “local space” in Edit node is just plain confusing…
I also may have stumbled upon a bug while manipulating with local space activated. Will submit a report for sure.

- go into SOP level
- add a box
- add a transform, wire it to the box
- mark transform, more mouse over scene view
- hit enter, transform gizmo shows up
- hit SHIFT+"
- move pivot to desired position

XSI only knows one transform for an entire geometry, houdini is kinda different.
every transform node has a pivot. if you wire one of those below some network, you
have created a full transform matrix with custom pivot at this position of the evaluation tree.
you can have as many as you want at any position in the tree.
it's also possible to chain those, so you have X pivots at specific locations, which then in turn
influence each other.

Cheers,
marcus

Hey marcus,
I saw your reply just now.
Unfortunately your suggestion is not very different from Rob's - his modifies the pivot at OBJ level while yours the pivot at SOP level.

Again, what I'm after is moving an object at scene level while keeping its geometry in place. This is very useful in modeling and rigging. Regarding the latter - think of a foot ctrl created by drawing a curve. After completing it you want to move its center to the ankle (just an example, setups can differ widely) while keep the actual curve geometry fixed, where you've drawn it. Currently you can do this using the pivot, but I'd prefer to not touch the pivot and keep it zeroed out, otherwise I'd have to key it to make sure that in case it's modified it will snap back to the keyed value. This adds an unnecessary curve.

Now, since I'm no longer trying to be a generalist, my actual interest with this lies in modeling workflows so if riggers/animators have no problem with what I've mentioned above because there's already an work-around in Houdini that lets you achieve this without adding extra keys/curves, that's sweet, but I as a modeler need this.