Hi,

I've just started playing with houdini. I *used* to do a lot of vfx work (power animator, wavefront, maya) but i don't really do that anymore, so im a bit rusty.

Having said that, houdini has always appealed (i develop as well) and with the apprentice i can have a good look at it.

That's a round about way of saying ‘help’ really.

How would i go about doing an animated sweep or a sweep in which i can change the shape of the object being swept, even if that's just scale. The sweep SOP does this for twist but the scale is uniform.

Im looking to grow some tree like tentacles down a curve path, so i thought this would be the best approach. I need a specific design so i would imagine L systems would be too random. It would be nice to change the shape of the curve being swept down the path. In maya i would probably do an animated sweep and animate the curve to be skinned as it goes down the path.

any guidelines would be really appreciated!

thanks
paul

Be sure to check the examples in the helpcard for the Sweep SOP, they show you how to use local variables for various stuff, including scaling.

Dragos

Hi Paul, I was thrashing around in the dark as much as you are now about a month or so ago (and to be honest still am!) but scour the forums and web for tutorials and things will come together. Watch all the free 3D Buzz tuts and all the free tuts on this site. Be sure to check out the ‘Old school blog’ too.

The RaySOP can help you wrap geometry and splines around other geometry, so this might help with you wrapping tenticles.

thanks steve,

you're right, there is a great resource out there but it's just wrapping my head around things again.

i managed to add a ramp to the parameter box and an expression to link that, so it looks pretty easy.

certainly after the mess of maya these days, houdini is like a breath of fresh, simple in some ways (believe it or not) air.

cheers
paul

I don't know if you discovered them yet but Houdini ships with hundreds of examples.

Put down your operator.
Press the help in the parameter for that operator.
Scroll down to the bottom and most have decent example files to show you what that operator can do in relevant contexts.

copy-paste relevant parts from the example in to your hip file.


-jeff