OK this is me trying to sort out some of the *how* in Houdini.

I'm not suuuper technical, but I don't mind digging into code.

What I'm trying to do:

I have a couple of pieces of geo that I'm looking to assemble, then copy that group of things to a grid of points, with each piece of geo having a couple of attributes randomized within a range.

In this case, I have a table, 4 chairs, a ketchup bottle, a mustard bottle, a napkin dispenser, and salt and pepper.

My thinking is that I would need to establish what attributes need to be affected, figure out the range that they should work within, then probably run that through a for loop to affect the attributes as they distribute the groups of geo to the points.

I've got a good handle on how to handle randomizing attributes if i just want to scatter a bunch of different things to a grid, but i'm not quite sure about how for loops would do this, in order to keep things positioned naturally.

essentially i'm trying to fill an area with tables and chairs with props on the table in a somewhat specific, but controllably randomized way.

I'm just not sure how to start tinkering to make that work.

I'll probably just cheat this by making 3-4 different arrangements of chairs and table settings and instancing them to a grid in Solaris.