Cheers Werner, I was unaware of the MMB which works well enough for the time being. Viewport work definitely needs a bit of love in Houdini.



A>

Hi,

I need to transform something by a small amount and would like to use the manipulators to do it, but the pivot position is a long way off. In old softimage land it wasn't a problem as you could transform stuff without having manips visible. Is there a quick way to do this in Houdini, working in the viewport and not using the ladders? Even a “move pivot to bounding object / vertex average” type thing would work so long as it's at sop level.



cheers,

A>

Hi Artur,

well my massive chute certainly won't be helping, cheers for that. Do you have a clear idea of what the scale issue was doing? I've always done fluids in realflow as sph sims so flip fluids are new to me really. Could it be something to do with the voxel size of the fluid versus the thickness of collision obstacle? Can I do some sort of visualise on the voxel grid to check that?

The time has come to churn out something for real rather than endless tutorials and suprise surprise it's some fluid! Except my fluid is vanising… I've fallen at the first hedge as they say.

Collision geometry is really high res but the points just vanish. Point count goes down by half over a couple of hundred frames. If anyone can give me a pointer beyond “make your collision geometry thicker” i would be stoked…. I've attached the hip file and the .obj the the scene reads. Just knowing what's killing the points are going would be a start other wise it's back to the other fluid simulation solution which is a bit counter productive!

cheers,

A>

4k and two machines per licence… These guys mean business.

I'm having to move my camera and aim null in a front/side/top view to get the camera to do what I want. The default setup of having to rotate the camera to get it to point at an object is a pain especially if your camera is moving all over the place and the object you're interested is also moving around. If I don't set up an aim null then my perspective camera will orbit around some arbitrary point in space rather than a specific point in space. Being able to lock down a point in space that the camera is looking at AND move the camera around with the ease of view tools is what I and i think Julca are after.


cheers,

A>

Hi,

thanks to this thread https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/16761/ [www.sidefx.com] I managed to get command line rendering working using a.csh file that looks like this:

#!CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.323/bin/csh.exe -f
hrender -e -f 1 25 -v -d /out/mantra1 SPROJECTS/myhipfile.hiplc
hrender -e -f 25 50 -v -d /out/mantra1 SPROJECTS/myhipfile.hiplc
hrender -e -f 50 75 -v -d /out/mantra1 SPROJECTS/myhipfile.hiplc


only problem is they all render at once! Any idea how to get them to run sequentially please?


cheers,

A>

Hi,

does anyone know if there are differences between these 3 types of rendering? Are things unavailable in the render region/render view? For now i'm only talking about Mantra




cheers,

A>

Having slept on it and also compared the two I actually think it comes down to object preselection highlighting, I just don't like it as I find it distracting, the lack of usefull selected primitive highlighting in wireframe mode, it just looks like an edge select to me. The more i dig and direct compare the less I can put my finger on so it's good that you posed the question. I don't want Houdini to turn into soft at all but one thing soft has over every other package is workflow harmony which to someone involved in art can only be a good thing. I may well have made a fuss about (almost) nothing here so apologies if i have…

A>

Hi Twod,

that's certainly allowed me to crack on, very helpful. I do find the selection in Houdini tricky compared to soft, I know there's muscle memory involved but there might always be better ways to do things. I guess if the bulk of core users don't want things to change then it makes positive evolution of a product tricky.


cheers,

A>

Hi,

i put an RFE in regarding this, using an example of multiple small spheres inside a large sphere.

cheers,

A>

Hi,

being used to a viewport centric workflow i'm stuck with a general selection issue. I've got 2 spheres, a small one inside a bigger one. Is there any way to select the smaller one in the viewport?

cheers,

A>

Hi Guillaume,

i'm viewing through a camera in the scene view yes, and the mantra node has dof enabled as i can see it in the renderview.



cheers,

A>

Hi, is it possible to have depth of field when using the render region? Works fine in the render view but i'm a softy so I'm a region man! Are there other things the render region can't be used for? I'm using mantra btw.

cheers,

A>

Cheers Olaf,

it's a steep climb for sure but the view will be worth it.


A>

Hi,

having run through two different tutorials that that both stick particles to a surface using vops, one does it in dopnet and the other in a Sop network. I tried to swap the particular vex processes but ran aground.

Inside the vopnet with some of it's ICE style familiarity i can see what goes on but I realise I'm actually lost regarding the multiple types of vops and how they work in different places like a sopnet or a dopnet.

so…

Why so many different vops? why not just one if it's just driving vex under the hood? What's the difference between an attribute vop a point vop or a pop vop for example?

Why are some vops available in some places but not others? Why can i not have an attribute vop inside a dop network?

Last question, why does a vop laid down in a sop net have 4 inputs but one laid down in a dopnet only have one?

Plenty of doco/tutorial stuff for specific task but not much for overall joined up-ness.


cheers,

Andi.

N.B I added the hip file with both tutorial setups just in case.

That's freaky…. I was just about to ask the exact same thing. Either that or a feature request for a softimage style camera with aim.

+1 on this from me.

A>

Thank you Tomas, much obliged for these. Normally I'm pretty good about RTFM but in this instance I thought perhaps some varied responses from soft users might add to a rounder understanding on top of what the manual has to offer.

and thank you Jordi, i like the idea of simple debugging to watch how things respond but I think I've a small way to go yet before I can do that.


cheers,

A

Hi all,

coming from life in the simplicity of the op stack or ice tree of soft I'm feeling decidedly uneasy about how it works in Houdini. A simple bit of modelling is clearly very easy, start at the top and work your way down, but how are things being ordered when you have multiple items going in and out of a dopnet? In a rigid body object it has two streams in it, the one generating the data that goes to dops and then the dops fetch data read back in but where is it being told to run this stream first? Also in a dopnet, why does gravity come after the solver? If someone knows how this all fits together I would be grateful for a heads up.


cheers,

A>

thanks you Benjamin, bit of a learning curve with Houdini! So you recommend piping the cd attribute (or which ever attribute you want to access) into a constant shader to visualise it… Would i need to put CDR CDG CDB in the right slots in the shader for this to work?