At times the pointer changes to right pointing arrow with big + underneath. The only way, so far, to reset the cursor, is to restart Houdini.
ESC, and none of the mouse button clicks change it back. What is causing the pointer to change, and how do I change it back without restarting?

I've been experimenting with Blend SOP. This is the closest SOP for doing multi-target morphing (shape animation) I can find. I am wondering if there is another SOP like that handles more then 16 inputs?
So why only 16 inputs? Is that its becaouse doing lip-sinc animation requires 16 phenome targets?

Dave Rindner

Hi David,
This is because of the Drag n Drop. It's harmless and usually you can get rid of it by left-clicking in a blank area of the interface, like the background of a network.

Cheers,

Peter B

Blend SOPS, by design, can be daisy chained. Suppose you have two blend sops (blend1 and blend2) that you wish to chain togther. Pipe the output of your neutral face geometry into both blend1 and blend2 as the first input. We're gonna assume that the “differencing” option is turned on for all our blend sops (which is the default). Now pipe the output of blend1 into the second input of blend2. Set the blend value for the second input in blend2 to be 1. That's it. All other free inputs of the blend sops can be used for target shape geometry.

Now if you want to add a blend3, follow a similar procedure. Pipe the output of your neutral geometry into the first input of blend3. Pipe the output of blend2 into the second input of blend3 and set its corresponding blend value to 1.

Finally, the blend parameters of the Blend SOP are not that readable. So I would simply create a custom subnet operator. Drag n' drop the blend parameters you want to animate onto the custom subnet under its Properties > Parameters page (right-click on the tile in the net editor and choose Properties). I think the Tutorial guide has something related to this in its character sections.