Hi,

I can't seem to snap the pivot point in Houdini. Say i wanted to snap i to a point or the bottom of a cube how would i go about it? I do this all the time in Maya.

Cheers in advance

Graham

At the top right corner of the viewport is a small icon for turning on snaps.
Crtl+j also does it
Shift+Crtl+j brings up the snap options.

Detach your handle with ‘ (the one on the @ key - uk keyboard)
Do your snap then reattach with ’ again.

Hi Graham,

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy one-step way to snap the pivot. The only snapping option is to the Construction Plane which you have to make sure is framed on the selected geometry. Are you confused yet?

Please try the following in the viewport:

a. After putting down the Box SOP, type “s” then select the face(primitive) you would like to snap the pivot to.

b. After selecting, turn on the Construction Plane by clicking on the third button from the right of the View Controls toolbar (the row of buttons at the bottom of the viewport)

c. After turning on the Construction Plane, right click on the Construction Plane button & select “Frame on selected geometry”.

d. Now, to set up the Snapping Options, type Ctrl+Shift+j. Click on the Clear button in the dialog then drag the C-Plane point & edge sliders to the right. To turn on Snapping, type Ctrl+j.

e. Type Esc in the viewport to go to the View state then put down a Transform SOP in the viewport, select all & right click to complete. After you get the handle, you can switch to Pivot mode & drag the Pivot handle down to the C-Plane to snap to it.

I hope the above helps you & not make things worse. I'll leave it to you to go through the online manual to look for buttons etc.

Please let me know how it goes.

Cheers!
steven

Hey Steve, why do you go to all that bother with the construction plane? You can just snap directly to the points in the box. Of course if you want the handle aligned with a face it's more of a pain, you have to use orient picking which takes 3 extra clicks.
I endlessly rfe for an option to align handles to normals but no joy yet :cry:

Hi Simon,

For handles, the snapping options work great but not for the pivot (Ins key).

SESI, it will be very useful to extend the snapping options to the pivot as well.

I'm officially RFE'ing this!

Thanks!

Cheers!
steven

Works fine for me.

Hmm… maybe it's the versions I'm using. I tested with 8.0.313 & 8.0.383.

I know the handle detachment works but it isn't for the pivot since this is what Graham was asking.

Cheers!
steven

Steven, the problem is that when you put down the Transform SOP in the viewport, you probably reused the selection you had before, which is the entire box. Houdini won't let you snap to your own selection. One alternative is to forcefully disable the selection by right-clicking on the Transform SOP in the network editor and choosing “Toggle Highlight”. Now it will snap as expected.

That might be it. I'm old school and if I'm working on a whole selection I just append a transform sop and then enter the viewport.

Hey peeps,

Thanks for all the quick replys! I've tried all the methods you suggested and they all seem to work. Which is great. I'm still playing around with all the options at the minute just to get a grasp on it all.

The “orientation picking” seems very useful for aligning the pivot. (Maya 7 has only just added such a feature.) The ablity to place and align the pivot is one of the most important features for me when modeling.

Thanks again

side note start.

you know what i miss?
the jackmemory buttons at the bottom of the viewport. much like the one used for viewport memory.. it would store a jack's position. much harder to maintain now in the viewport centricSOP driven world.. sigh, but i miss it. it made certain task modeling very easy


side note end.
-k

edward
Steven, the problem is that when you put down the Transform SOP in the viewport, you probably reused the selection you had before, which is the entire box. Houdini won't let you snap to your own selection. One alternative is to forcefully disable the selection by right-clicking on the Transform SOP in the network editor and choosing “Toggle Highlight”. Now it will snap as expected.

/rant on

That's just screwed up.

If the handle detachment can snap to selected geometry then why is the pivot different??? Why does an user have make sure Highlight is off before the Pivot can snap?

I can be old school & new school but this frustrates the hell out of me.

/rant off

In this case, I would like to RFE for the pivot to snap to any selection.

Thanks for explaining Edward.

Cheers!
steven

Wow, I've never seen you rant before, Steven. How's production? It's now fixed in 8.0.528.

Hi Edward,

I guess it was bad hair day or something. Oops, I've no hair!

It's the smallest of differences between similar tools and/or features that is the most frustrating. I hope similar problems will be resolved in future versions as they are discovered.

Thanks again for the fix!

Cheers!
steven

gKelly
I can't seem to snap the pivot point in Houdini. Say i wanted to snap i to a point or the bottom of a cube how would i go about it? I do this all the time in Maya.

I'm a long time Maya user and I'm looking to just do this in H16; snap the pivot of a poly cube to its bottom. Then snap the polycube onto the grid center.

What's the suggested approach in 2017 for this?

In the pivot section on a transform, you can use $CEX $YMIN #CEZ then is the position spot put -$CEX -$YMIN -$CEZ and save it out as a preset on a transform This will snap any object to the center of the world with whatever its bottom minimum is. This is a procedural way but works like a charm. You then append another transform and move.