The Facet SOPwhen to cusp on a poly mesh breaks welded points/ edges. scene attached. It should not be doing this should it ?

see attached

rob

yep that's how it works.

Unfortunately because Houdini doesn't suport vertex normals the way hard edges are made is by uniqueing the points. You'll notice you can do this and no normal attribute is created. This is good in one way but bad for modelling as you then have to deal with the headache of unique points.
I think this runs so deep it will never change which is a same because its a right royal pain in the behind…

Why is this not in the manual in big bold letters coupled with a workflow to match !

As an aside or an alternate workflow, you can use crease weights and render your object as subd's to get hard edges, soft edges or pretty much anything in between.

Currently this mandates a workflow where you have a Subdivide SOP set to display/template to see an approximation of the edge as you adjust the crease weight with Crease SOPs.

I have tried this work flow and its not really working for me. just as a test on some letters applying a crease to the edges with a sub D node below as you can see its not that good at all. On the letter I at the end ever edge is a crease value of 1 so you would of thought there would be no smoothing at all in the render.Not to mention the Sub D op filling in the spaces ! I will keep on seeing if there is anything else I can do to improve things.


R

Simon
Unfortunately because Houdini doesn't suport vertex normals the way hard edges are made is by uniqueing the points. You'll notice you can do this and no normal attribute is created. This is good in one way but bad for modelling as you then have to deal with the headache of unique points.
I think this runs so deep it will never change which is a same because its a right royal pain in the behind…

I think that it's inevitable that SESI are going to have to make a sweep and evaluate what it would take to make H9.1 or H10 work with vertex normals (if they haven't done that already) mainly because it's a major limitation wrt package interoperability as I'm sure they've discovered after reading Cristin's post, if not just for pure Houdini work now that Houdini has emerged out of the DIY effects arena into fully fledged lighting domain. It was okay in the old days when there was nothing to compare to but Houdini is treading the same turf as others now.

A side serving of hope: I know work has been done to allow Mantra++ itself to be able to render with vertex normals in the future, and so hopefully this is the thin end of the wedge.

So really then I have no other choice but to use unique points to get what I want.Out of interest am I correct using unique points will creat a nightmare for texturing ? if not what should I be aware of later on.

From these answers I take it then Houdini is not used in Studio's to model then , if its such a pain in the ass with unique points.

Rob

It doesn't create a nightmare for texturing, no, but it's really incredibly inconvenient to have having to modify topology for the sake of cusping. One place it always bites you is when you're doing connectivity-based operations on your geometry (like with the Connectivity SOP or connectivity-aware tools like Sculpt, etc). I suppose the texturing tools work more akwardly too, so you're actually quite right… All places I've worked in model and UV in alternate software, and these import okay.

Do you know about the Vertex Split SOP? If you import geometry from other software which define vertex normals, you can use the Vertex Split to split the points right before you need to render. If you split it at the last possible moment before you render it you kind of avoid suffering the consequences of the topology change… but your OpenGL viewport won't shade right.

Of course, none of this really helps you if you're attempting to model in Houdini too…

Help us, Obi Wan Bargiel!

circusmonkey
So really then I have no other choice but to use unique points to get what I want.Out of interest am I correct using unique points will creat a nightmare for texturing ? if not what should I be aware of later on.

From these answers I take it then Houdini is not used in Studio's to model then , if its such a pain in the ass with unique points.

Rob

You could put a very small bevel around all the edges, that will look nice and create a much harder edge

I attached an example file on how to extrude and bevel fonts in Houdini.
You use the Extrude SOP (not the Poly Extrude SOP) and you should supply a bevel cross-section.

To handle some screwy fonts (think artist blindly contorting bezier curves in very bad ways to build font…), I sometimes remove in-line points with a Refine SOP but it may or may not shade nicely on the bevel side cusps.

The network is automatic and requires no hand-tweaking selections to work once you dial in the extrusion in to the Extrude SOP.


There is an existing RFE for the support of vertex normals.

jason_iversen
Help us, Obi Wan Bargiel!

Hehe, is this where I am supposed to say “may the force be with you”?

I am going to talk to the other Obi's here and see what can be done. This is an architectural problem that runs very deep, but I see how it's becoming an increasing thorn in your backs.

Cristin

As ever Jeff thanks for showing this as the way to go for the workflow with curves !

rob