One of the frustrating things about learning Houdini is the amount of expressions used to get things done. This is par for the course I know but today I was trying to figure out what exactly a $CR variable is, I'm happy to RTFM but I spent an hour just trying to find it in the manual. I do a search $CR, no dice. I know it's some sort of color variable so I search for that. nothing comes up. I find global VOP variables.. nothing there.
How would one find any info on this stuff? the manual is ridiculously hard to use in my opinion.
Silly I know, but how do I use the manual? ex. here.
2655 4 0- timot.mo
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- sepu
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in plain simple way to understand $CR is red $ CB is Blue $CG is green or you could see as x,y,z or 1,2,3
Anyway I would recommend to move away as much as you can from local variables(still some local variables are useful), meaning all the $CR, $PT, $NUMPT etc
And get more familiar with Attributes @ much better in my opinion. So $CR will be @Cd.r or @Cd.x
If you want to know more about @
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/vex/snippets [sidefx.com]
If you still want to know about Local variables I couldn't find the same thing for 15.5 but this still applies
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/expressions/_globals [sidefx.com]
Anyway I would recommend to move away as much as you can from local variables(still some local variables are useful), meaning all the $CR, $PT, $NUMPT etc
And get more familiar with Attributes @ much better in my opinion. So $CR will be @Cd.r or @Cd.x
If you want to know more about @
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/vex/snippets [sidefx.com]
If you still want to know about Local variables I couldn't find the same thing for 15.5 but this still applies
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/expressions/_globals [sidefx.com]
Edited by sepu - Feb. 17, 2017 20:30:32
- timot.mo
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Sepu to the rescue again! Thanks!
I found that _globals page as well online but there's nothing in there about $CR so thanks for the explanation and the advice. I can see that they're really pushing these VEX expressions now but it wasn't clear to me until now what they were. Noticed them when I laid down a point SOP. I guess I can excuse myself from learning local variables if VEX is better.
Thanks!
I found that _globals page as well online but there's nothing in there about $CR so thanks for the explanation and the advice. I can see that they're really pushing these VEX expressions now but it wasn't clear to me until now what they were. Noticed them when I laid down a point SOP. I guess I can excuse myself from learning local variables if VEX is better.
Thanks!
- RobotHeadArt
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I agree that these $ variables make learning Houdini harder than it should be. I come from a programming background so I kind of expected a location that lists them all like most programming languages have but it doesn't look like there is. What's also confusing is that there are the @ expressions which is not clear what the difference between the two are and why some of the $ ones don't have a @ equivalent ($F vs $FF).
- tamte
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local variables are being phased out, and they are local for a reason since not every node supports them
but if you have node that supports them it's usually stated in help
like for example above mentioned Group SOP
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/group#locals [sidefx.com]
which then points you to
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/standardvariables [sidefx.com]
as it probably supports them all
or Transform SOP
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/xform#locals [sidefx.com]
which has just subset mentioned
or Sweep SOP with it's own unique set of local variables
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/sweep#locals [sidefx.com]
but if you have node that supports them it's usually stated in help
like for example above mentioned Group SOP
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/group#locals [sidefx.com]
which then points you to
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/standardvariables [sidefx.com]
as it probably supports them all
or Transform SOP
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/xform#locals [sidefx.com]
which has just subset mentioned
or Sweep SOP with it's own unique set of local variables
http://sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/sop/sweep#locals [sidefx.com]
Tomas Slancik
FX Supervisor
Method Studios, NY
FX Supervisor
Method Studios, NY
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