this is almost exactly what i want. the issue with this approach though is that you are removing a lot of geometry to make it tiling. this would result in texture seams or (in the case of other shapes than a cube) geometry not alligning. gonna have a look and see if I can use some of your ideas to find a solution for my issue.

thank yoU!

Hi everyone,

I am having some issues getting the PolyReduce Sop to do what i want. (or possibly im expecting it to do something it cant.)

What I am trying to do is create a cube, which i run a voronoi fracture on and then offset the 4 quadrants to make the mesh tileable. (see image 1)

I then want to use this tileable mesh as a base to refracture to create a tileable destructible wall. Now the issue I am having is cleaning up all of the interior faces that were generated with the voronoi operation. The solution i am trying at the moment is to convert the result to a VDB with a very low voxel size to give me enough accuracy to capture the edge detail, then convert it back to polys and then run a poly reduce with the original mesh as a feature.

i have the stiffen border and features set at 10,000 which should penalize it from changing from the original however it is still refusing to match the point positions of the original mesh. resulting in small cracks when i try to tile the mesh next to each other. the reduce operation is also causing one specific area of the emsh to be very dense which i do not understand.

Any help would be great. I am also open to any other suggestions to try and solve this.

I have attached the file along with some images of the issues if anyone would like to take a look.

Thank you!

Hi guys,

This is a call to the FX and animation guys out there. I am currently trying to import a mesh into houdini, fracture and sim it, export it and then use a mel script to parent and constrain joints to all the chunks in maya and then skin the joints back onto their respective joints.

This was all going fine untill after exporting my fractured and simd file from houdini and importing it into maya, i seperated all the chunks and discovered that the chunks themselves dont have any transforms. The vertices seem to be whats animated in stead.

Now im guessing what i should be doing is seperating out the chunks in houdini and baking the animation data there but I am at a loss as to how to do this.

thanks for any help you could offer me in advance

ooh very cool, thanks guys ^^

hello everybody,

its been a while since ive gotten truely stuck with houdini. however, it seems that time has arrived that i must seek council from the more experienced users.

what i am trying to acomplish is a renaissance brickwork pattern

what i have managed to get so far is this:


this was done using two foreach SOPs. the first one to create a row of bricks all with random widths. Then another one to stack them on top of each other with different heights.

Now what i cant find out how to do is give the stacked rows different widths than the original one.

I have attached the file in case i have not been clear.

thanks in advance for any help ^^ i am truly up a creek without a paddle here [imageshack.us]

ah, thank you

it's working! however a bit too well, when i drop a stiff sphere on top of a stiff plane they just bounce off each other without deforming. im guessing the problem is the sphere isnt going fast enough so my next question is how do i give the cloth object a vector? in the masterclass on crumpling it's done by just adding a createattribute nude, turning it into a vector and giving it a value…however when i try to replicate this it does nothing. anyone know what im doing wrong?

thanks!

hey guys,

quick question really.

I'm currently trying to achieve the effect of a metal plane being dented and eventually punctured as a RBD object gets thrown at it. Ive managed to get it to puncture because making it tearable does this easily as the RBD objects just goes straight through. However, when i just want it to dent, if i drop a RBD object on top of a cloth plane with stiffnes turned up very high, the object just keeps dropping and the plane just keeps bending to accomodate it giving very ugly results.

can anyone give me a solution that will cause the deforming of the cloth to slow down the dropping RBD object and eventually bring it to a hault?

Many thanks,

Chris

hello guys,

yes im spamming up these forums but houdini is so complicated to get started with.

anyways, im a little confused as when i try exporting as fbx in the student version it is greyed out. however, in the following thread:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=91190&sid=8747a225659ef94752c26d2cd5fb2404 [sidefx.com]

it says that fbx export from the student version is possible.

now let me explain what i am trying to do so you can all put it in context.

What i want to do i import a mesh, from maya, shatter and destroy it, and then get this animation into UDK.

Now untill now what i have tried to do is to create the desired effect in houdini. then export a sequence of OBJ's into maya, turn these into a blendshape, contrain joints to the chunks, bake the animation on these joints, delete the constraints and then skin the chunks to their corresponding joints. then exporting this into UDK using the actorX plugin.

this is a huge amount of work for a simple object with 20 chunks, and impossible to use for a complicated model being fractured into 100s of pieces. this is the reason that a direct export as FBX from houdini to UDK would be a fantastic solution for me. but i dont have the cash to shell out for a license.

any help?

thanks a ton.

ok one more question to finish this thread off and then it can be locked.

at the moment all the pieces are being imported as individual objects. (i have 10 objects in my outliner)

what i would like is for them to be imported as 1 object as am importing a whole series of .obj to be combined in to a blendshape. once i make the blendshape i then want to seperate it to get my individual and animated chunks.

woohoo! works! u guys rockkkk!

hmmm thats weird….any idea for a fix?

nope…literally just a cube made in maya and scaled. exported as obj and imported in the geometry node in houdini…weird stuff..

ive swapped out my imported .obj for a houdini box and it works….weird that it doesnt like it for imported objects. any idea why this is? for this test case it doesnt really matter as its just a stretched out cube which i could do in houdini too. However if i want to shatter more complex geometry that i need to import from maya its not going to work…

@ erik

still not working even with it unchecked. However, when i try to import mine into maya i do get a notice saying:

Your OBJ file contains faces shared by multiple groups.
maya cannot create multiple objects for this file.
a single mesh object will be created instead.
the OBJ group information will be captured in maya sets.

I do not get this message when importing the cube from your file.

@ johner

That doesnt work, first thing i tried

ooh result!

when i import your cube into maya it does exactly what im looking for!
however when i tried to replicate it on my own wall it didnt do it? all i did was add a group node then in the edit/delete/ tab put inside and outside in the group bar.

was there anything else you did?

p.s my fracture is also using different nodes…your uses a isoofset1 and a scatter1 before going into the fracture. mine uses converttofog1 and chunkcenters is there any reason for this and should i be concerned about it?

hi erik

no unfortunately turning “create output groups” off or erasing the names of interior and exterior group does nothing..upon import to maya and seperation the inside and outside pieces are still seperated..

is there maybe a possibility to merge or fuse these two groups?

hello houdini vets!

i have a (hopefully) quick question to ask that i can not seem to solve myself. i am currently creating a test case for a school assignment using the destruction tools within houdini.

What i want to do i import an object into houdini, fracture it, smash a ball into it (like one of the very first tutorials) and then export it back into maya.

I have currently managed to do all of this however there is one issue. the fractured chunks get imported into maya as one object, i can seperate these however every chunk is then seperated into inside and outside objects.

Is there a way to get them to export as whole chunks? not as seperate objects for the inside and outside pieces?

Many thanks from a new houdini enthousiast