apart from I switch to it and desktops houdini 19.5.534

holy moly I can answer this! was looking into getting vertex colors to actually read in Unreal from an exported FBX and came across this. Answer better late than never, and for the next artist along, its because a Houdini heightfield is not actual geometry yet. its some kind of pseudo volume / bitmap layer . to paint actual vertex colors you need actual vertices , so simply convert heightfield to polygon and paint away...

what a tease! was just looking for some thickness mapping solutions!

yeah trying to do simple stuff that used to work previously in V1 Houdini engine for Maya but now for v2 in Unreal. following some v1 tutorials on a simple poly reduce ,the desired 'Houdini inputs' never appear. the docs make zero sense to me. beforehand all you had to do was have a geo object connected to the in before you made the digital asset, now, no matter what I do I cannot get an input for unreal to appear in the digital asset once its unreal. All I want it drop stuff onto the input for houdini engine to cook. any simple tutorials on how to even get this elementary part working in V2? stuck after several tutorials and attempts so far...

eg following this real simple example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4pbcbqiO18 [www.youtube.com] the HDA when bought into Unreal 4.26 has zero inputs available... how do I do simple HDA's that allow me to use inputs..what am I missing?

**edit** to answer my own question... as usual if not following SideFX instructions TO THE LETTER it will not work. so I tried v1.. it WORKED exactly as intended, so I looked again at v2 explicitly and I realise I just copied houdini Engine v2 to the PLUGINS folder only... in the intrstructions it says put the folder into plugins/Runtime/ ... so doing this and now I have my Houdini Parameters and Houdini Inputs as intended. sorry for the age old USER ERROR noise.. carry on!

yeah same. from wave tank shelf tool tried pinning inside the dop network , the wave tank initial, fluid and extended NONE of the fluid objects or particle fluid surfaces accept a whitewater selection…? what is missing?


hmm so, in a new scene I make flat tank,and white water works straight away from the flattank_fluid selection . what is the difference..?

the scene I was working on was setup EXACTLY the same. upon closer examination it appears that I had turned particles OFF in the guides visualisation of the flat tank FLIP object. turning the particle guide back on completed the whitewater opertion suc cesfully.

WHY do particle guides need to be switched on in in the Flip Object in order for whitewater to work? does not make ANY sense! but a gotcha for anyone else

- drag and drop into houdini from explorer: This was not in SI, but I feel it could help a LOT for new people. Basically define bevaiours in houdini based on dragging and dropping files from OS into it. For example:

yes its been a while for you in Si then as we have had drag and drop for quite some versions

but yes I confess the first thing I did with all these wonderful .hip file gifts to be found everywhere is to (try) drag them from my downloads folder into houdini.

also with ICE compounds they can be made a link on a web page and downloaded directly into an ICE tree. very user friendly!

Ciaran (hello!) also wrote us a pointcloud cache drag and drop from inside Softimage's own internal browser. so yes automatic file type association and relevant import behaviors are very welcome speed enhancements

hey katana is there anyway to shrink that image or make it a thumbnail. its killing this forum reading ability for me on this page

ha there you go, that is the info I needed!

thanks Marty thats exactly what I wanted to hear, why it is so slow and of course if voxel size is set to a ratio of initial bounding size and does not keep that ratio after creation - which admittedly I assumed it would as it is called a ‘rig’ but hey. will have to improve this rig so the ratio factoring stays intact

8)

thanks Marty, sorry for being a pedant, but that's exactly what I did.

there is one object. A sky rig.

entering that there are 2 nodes connected. A sky_Bounding_box and a sky1

selecting the sky_bounding_box object

in the transform panel changing the scale from 1 to 10 on each axis is really slow, 20 mins+ and never cooks for what should be something very quick, no? I am not scaling the sky I am scaling the bounding_box that comes default with the sky rig

also tried with a box rather than default one. works quick to cook on any scale to start but scale it afterwards… uh uh

its not a big deal as I can just get the correct size box *before* applying.

no progress bars? :shock:

ok well I stopped whatever the heck it was doing after 20 mins full proccessor trundle

made a new cube 10 x 10 x 10 and a sky rig takes microseconds to create.

so first rule of sky rig.

do not scale afterwards

:?

ok I am cooking. I clicked Cloud FX>Sky rig, default bounding box.

its makes a 1x1x1 cube with some lumps in them. thats not really big enough for a sky now surely. ok lets try scaling 10 x 10 x 10 . it says its cooking Op but am still waiting. it just tells me the time elapsed, is there a way to tell how long something is likely to take? if it will ever finish?

my processors are maxed out so its definately doing *something*

ops: sorry if this is stupid question

halfy for the win


am so pleased that you did this. also wondered why you had not come sooner. congrats on the new role! are you still working in rendering department as well?

also, have definitely tried on a few occasions to give Houdini a serious shot and either fell asleep in my chair watching some professor bloke wearing grey going on and on in a monotone alpha wave induced voice *or* got lost in the warren and maze of vop chop sop block nop wots.

a crash course on terminolgy from a softimage perspective would be sooo full of kind hearted empathy and win so it would be possible to map out existing softimage terminology areas into the various houdini (*)ops and where they live and categorized.

next problem I had was the operator stack. when exploring some of the prepackaged effects like pyros and clouds I could not follow the execution path down. like in an ICE tree it executes compounds (that contain compounds) from the top down, with a ‘simulate’ node at the end. if a node is not connected it wont compute. I found a number of areas when trying to follow the ‘logical’ path of executions through the various layers of houdini ‘compounds’ that make up the effect that seemed, well just illogical and could not work out how they were connected or functioned


being shown this by a normal houdini user I realised I did not notice easily when going in and out of these ‘compounds’ when domain of ops change . softimage has color coded modes of operation that I think is missing from houdini , although its there on some areas but its like a 1 pixel color stripe or something. I think I will make a seperate thread highlighting this problem when I encounter again but it was just frustrating and confusing in general when seen just from a softimage perspective :x I hope you understand

anyway. phew. got that off my chest. nice one halfy!