Well, I thought I'd try a whole new approach and found a better way! Houdini is awesome and I didn't need to do what I was doing, instead I just made a tube used the UV-Unwrap node and set it to strip and zero spacing. Normals are of course perfect now and the seams are totally acceptable and it's only two nodes. Only took me 2 days.

I had a play with “fix seams” did some experimenting with and it's even worse for the actual texture as seen in the image. But the normals still stay the same. At the same time I feel I might be taking the wrong approach to procedurally texture this pole with constant pixel density. I was unwrapping it at the seams and computing arc length, which works beautifully except the seams normals.

The normals did not get fixed (back) with Fix Boundary Seams on, and the texture(front) gets squished.

An easy pipe with eight divisions and it's opened to it can be UV'd nicely. In the picture the seam runs from top to bottom and at that seam the normals are not right, they should be averaged and they are not. I tried many things but have not found a solution. The normals sop angle is set to 180 degrees as well. Also tried the facet node and that made no changes either. Any ideas or suggestions?

“In terms of workflow, do you have some ideas and/or suggestions on making it easier to use the plugin? Our goal is to make using the plugin as seamless and painless as possible?”

Yes, the workflow is exactly what I am working thru now and I must say going from Houdini to Unity is pretty rough. I'm making some digital assets and at least have them nicely organized (like how cool the parameter interface is). Now bring it in to Unity and the interface looks great. “Now what the heck is all this mess?” so I tried for 4 days to learn and test and try tricks to organize the hierarchy a bit - NO GO!

I want to have the ability to make folders/sub-folders with the things I want.

Take for instance the curve decorator. You want to instantiate 7 cubes you would think you would have a folder 7 cubes, not a folder and sub-folder let alone the curve folders and game objects. For 7 cubes I see here(attached image) over 27 game objects…hmm. So spending days trying to organize that side of things I think it was in order that I drop my suggestion.

Respectfully,
Bryan Meadows

Well, that worked! Thank you.

I'm kind of new to Houdini and just can't figure out how to combine two meshes? Example: I make two boxes separated by 1 meter and I want to combine the two objects into one object mesh. When I export the object to Unity it remains as two meshes and I want only one.The merge sop still keeps them as separate meshes. Fuse won't work because they are separate which also goes for Boolean too. I feel like I have explored many sop's but don't know which one I need? I've attached two images to visually express my issue.

Wanted to install another copy to my laptop for an upcoming Houdini party and found this post. Now I know why I can not and this really sucks.

In a perfect world, I would love to have the licensing like the Steam model or Substance. The Steam model is the best, I can have one copy but use it on multiple devices like when I'm away at shows or on the road. Steam, as you notice will not allow you play multiple instances but does allow as many installs as required. To limit my work to one machine in this day and age is a complete logistics nightmare.

I work on a PC at home mainly, but I also work abroad on the laptop but not enough to warrant buying the program again. Side Effects needs to be a little bit more open with their approach in my opinion. Example, look what happened when Unity opened up a free version for under 100k , well it left the competition behind. I think the licensing model will actually change the amount of user coming into the program. The Unity gamedevs will line up when they know what Houdini can do, but in it's current form it's very unapproachable. I am amazed how many people do not use Houdini since it's the most wonderful program I've ever used.