Hey Guys,

i have an issue and i cannot really wrap my head around this.

First of all i am by no means any kind of coder or programmer. But i have been learning a lot always trying to keep it not too technical so that i not get to frustrated.

The program i use to learn programming is called “processing”. I guess it is not anything high end and it was created to teach people the concepts of coding and for that it does a great job. Ive improved a lot thanks to this.

Now i know a little bit of VEX as well but i have never done anything serious with it.

Since processing is also a pretty graphical program and you mostly program visual stuff on the screen i thought it would be super cool to try to transfer the things i have done in processing to VEX.

There is only one major difference and i hope there is a way around this. Or maybe i am just missing something.

In processing you have a main “draw” function that just executes your code over and over.
This is fundamental to the program.

Is it possible to recreate something like this in Houdini. Because in Processing i would have a ball with a velocity value and then i would just say

location.add(velocity)

for example

So you dont have to include time or frame in your expression - it kind of comes for free.

So in Houdini i could use time or frames or maybe something else but i think at some point it would always break whatever i intent to do.

I hope someone that also knows processing is around here. Otherwise it might be a little hard to understand what i mean.
Anyway - i hope someone is here that can help me!

All the best!

Put your attribwrangles inside a solver node and hit play.

I suppose it depends on what your trying to do. @Frame or @Time should work in most cases, if not then yeah a solver SOP should help.

Check out this thread on odforce where people have been translating Processing into Houdini:

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/24056-learning-vex-via-animated-gifs-bees-bombs/#comment-141340 [forums.odforce.net]

For things where you want the state to change over time, the solver does work perfectly and you can control sub-steps too. But often, your attributes and geometry can simply evolve over time, or be driven by a single parameter, and then you can just use frames or time or a parameter to measure instead.

Here is a very simple bouncing ball “Hello World” I did using the solver sop. When it reaches a certain value it bounces and reverses direction in that axis. Dive into the solver sop to see the VEX code.

Also, man I love that bees-bombs thread!

Hey guys,

sorry that i didnt reply sooner - but i thought i would get a notification in my email inbox if someone answers to this thread.
Now i came here and see you guys already responded xD Sorry.

Thanks for bringing up the Solver SOP. I have never used it. Actually i have not heard of it before. Good to know. I also asked another friend who is quite proficient in coding and VEX and he had no idea how to solve my issue.

I will ask him to take a look at the Solver SOP himself as well.^^

Chris - thank you for that example. I just took a look at the file and this is exactly what i was trying to start with.
And if i tied that direction to @Frame or @Time i would run into issues pretty soon.

Very nice!

OK - so the Sover SOP it is! Thanks again you guys. Really glad about the swift responses!