Hi. I'm following a tutorial on dynamics where the instructor selects several points in a constraint (roughly the bottom 1/3 of the points) and then in the tab menu, selects Group. This then places just the selected points into a group.

Unfortunately, the tutorial was made in Houdini 15 and I am using the Apprentice version of 16 and it no longer seems to work this way.

I was able to turn on the old Group node using “opunhide Sop group” in the Textport and it still isn't working the way that it does in his tutorial.

I opened up his finished project and everything is working as it does in his tutorial. I just cannot seem to recreate it. Neither the old group node nor any of the new ones seem to allow me to select a group of points and then have that data automatically plug into a group node just by creating a group node after selecting the points. If additional steps are required, I have no idea how to do that as a relative noob to the program (I'm revisiting Houdini again after trying it a couple of years ago).

I found a solution that seems to work for now. After selecting the points and then choosing the old Group SOP from the tab menu, as mentioned before, it doesn't automatically make the selected points a new group of their own and place that point data into the pattern field of the group node as it seemed to in the tutorial. However…

If I then select that group node and then marquee select the points again over in the perspective window, and then right-click and choose “Accept Selection” from the pop-up menu, it will then create a second group node that correctly contains all of the points I just selected and properly adds that point data to the pattern field of this new group node.

I then just have to delete the useless first group node and now I've achieved in a few more steps what the instructor of the tutorial seemed to be able to do in just one step with Houdini 15. Maybe somebody will be able to suggest a better way of achieving the same result with Houdini 16.

Hi I had a similar question using H17. I found a simple solution!

1. Make your polygon selection,

2. Up the top chose Visibilty> hide non selected. Then a visibility node appears and has the range already typed out.

3. Copy and paste that range to a GROUP RANGE node.


Hope this helps someone