“where things are” in houdini isn't a simple question… One habit I've got into is driving a transform node srt with a null at object level using relative referencing, which won't work if there's any hierarchy involved, so evolving from that i managed to get world position and rotation for an object, (hierachy or not) by using the Reference>scene data where you can access the world position and rotation of an obj level object. That has to happen inside and obj level “control object” (at 0,0,0)and then the values can be referenced outside by anything in the usual way.

It certainly works for me in this specific instance, but - given every time i have an aha moment it's followed 3 weeks later by an actually i've no idea what's going moment, I wondering what could be wrong with my setup. I know information about world space is something people request regularly so i'm dubious it was that simple for me to stumble across.

I've referenced the values back on to the node i'm interested in for handiness.

Hip attached

cheers,

A>

Why in Houdini it is not possible to actually work with world space values not just for objects but also for components is a complete mystery to me.
This is absolutely fundamental and important for all kinds of things, two of them are architectural modelling or film set reconstruction where you rely on measured data. Not being able to transform a point to a specific absolute position in world space in the edit node is the biggest drawback of using Houdini compared to other tools. (apart from actual multi object editing)
Why should it not be possible to display and enter absolute values instead of relative ones? Houdini can work internally with object relative coordinates anyway if this is required for proceduralism. All we need is to see the world position and input world coordinates. Converting it into local position in the background is very simple math.