Hi everyone, my question is how can I slide points along the surface of the mesh in a specific direction?
I provided a short video of my Flipbook so you can see what I am trying to accomplish. I am making a tidal wave that is suppose to crash down on a city. So I made a water mesh out of a clipped Tube and put some noise through it (Point Vop) and than I applied points to be my surface foam (whitewater) by Point Vop-Point Cloud-Point Deform-Ray nodes. The only problem is my noise is moving upwards like the wave would but my points are just stuck to one position only and they deform with the mesh but don't travel; with the noise. I heard of "XYZ dist" but I have no clue what that even means.
Any ideas?

Thank you.

I'm trying to export a simple camera animation as an FBX out of Houdini. The animation consists of keyframes for translate and rotation at the start and end of the sequence. The interpolation between them needs to be constant, so has been set to linear.

Inside the animation editor in Houdini it looks like this (only translate shown):



However, when I bring this into my game engine, I can see that easing in and out has been added to the animation data. So if I reimport the FBX back into Houdini and look again in the animation editor, it looks like this:



Why has the animation been eased during export? I can't see any settings on the FBX export menu which could explain this.

I can get around the problem by baking the animation before exporting. However, I am doing this for a web-based game engine (Playcanvas) so file size is important. Baking the animation basically triples the size of the resultant file.

I've attached a hip file.

Anyone know why this would be happening?

Get the details and apply here:

https://sidefx.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=44 [sidefx.bamboohr.com]

Hello,

I'm brand new to Houdini and have been working on a "shockwave" effect and I have just looked in the Render View and there was only black screen. Then I tried to actually render it but it would still only show a black screen.

I've attached some images below to show the issues that I'm having.



This is my Network inside of a Geometry.



This is how it looks inside Scene View.



This is how it looks in the Render / Render View.



Here's the project file. Please help me out if you can



Thank you.

Hello everyone.
I have been using Houdini to Niagara on several projects for now and it works fine.
However i started to want to time stretch / duplicate points and most importantly loop my sims.
I do it with a couple of time remap nodes in Houdini.

Of course it doesn't work within Niagara.
(the sim ends in the middle, exactly where the "end" of the sim is and the second part is not showing up).
I tried to alter a few attributes ( age, life ) with no success.

I am wondering if there are intrinsic attributes that should be changed in order for this to work?

thanks!
(I have attached an example file if you want to test)

Howdy,
okay so i've read the houdini engine manuals, watched videos, troubleshooted, and i have no idea how to actually get unreal to start the session so i can actually use houdini assets. the plugin's installed, what am i missing??

do i need houdini open? do i need to press some button in houdini? i tried the session sync thing but that didn't connect i just got 109 errors. the plugin is installed correctly, it's just not connecting. things show up in the starter kit project but i can't edit them as all Houdini Enginge Sessions attempts fail. it's driving me up the wall, i've been at this for 3 hours and the documentation for this is very bad.

A simple step by step process for wtf i'm supposed to do would be deeply appreciated, i'm dead-stuck.

EDIT: Okay so i slept and dug more into error logs, it seems like the plugin on the github that the main page tells you to use is out of date or something. 3.5 instead of needed 3.6. it works now that i used to latest one downloaded from the launcher tool

Please ask me a question. When you do terrain segmentation, you always divide the points of other plots to copy to one plot. Why? If there is no problem with instance, there is a problem with foliage

thank you

One of the main cool things about node based applications like houdini, is the clear visual representation of what's going on during the build of a recipe or when opening a scene made by somebody else...

Unfortunately, this is not the case with houdini scenes due to the fact that we have to keep referencing lots of object paths from/to different nodes where most of the times these nodes are even referenced inside a totally different OP network/subnet.

So, I suggest the following:
1. Allow the OP networks to be expandable (like backdrops - may be using the same UI method with different look)
2. Add a flag in the node view settings that allow hiding/showing the indirect connections between nodes references (the connection lines can be dotted with an arrow showing the direction of the reference connection, and can also be color coded make it clear if this is an object reference or attribute reference).
3. When 'tab' is pressed or the user requested a new node, check if the mouse is over an expanded OP Network, if it is, then filter the possible nodes as how already happening when requesting new node in this type of OP network.
4. Add input ports to nodes like 'object merge', 'dopimport'...etc, so the user can directly connect to them rather than referencing an object path (or maybe create equivalent nodes with nicer names since in this case, it won't be a dopimport or objectMerge, but it will be just a pass through with some parameters).

Hi everyone,

I am trying to do a water splash sim in Houdini, and having some trouble with the whitewater.

I found a similar effect to what I want to achieve here: https://vimeo.com/247642418, [vimeo.com] there is a file provided but it was created in an older version of Houdini and so there are some problems with it.

My main issue is the whitewater render. It doesn't seem to capture the same level of detail as the one shown in the video. There are denser areas in the water with lots of whitewater, while the sparser areas have much smaller spray particles.

My guess so far was that it might have something to do with how the creator of the file has used the foamdensity attribute to control the pscale of the particles, however I am not able to replicate this process. I have provided images of both my render as well as the desired result. Any help would be appreciated.

It looks like gadgets bound to viewer state can't be picked and located if they are covered by the viewport geometry (it's not the case for handle gadgets as far as I can tell)

Is there a way to control how they are located. I can make them always visible by set fade_factor to 1.0 but they are still not receiving locating events under the geometry.

Hello Im getting this error
LogHoudiniEngine: Error: Starting up the Houdini Engine module failed: built and running versions do not match.
LogHoudiniEngine: Error: Defined version: 3.5.api:1 vs Running version: 3.6.api:1
LogHoudiniEngine: Error: Failed to start the Houdini Engine session - Failed to initialize HAPI
When I try to run the unreal plugin for houdini and try to start a session.

Any Ideas

Hello, I try to find a solution on Internet but it was impossible. I had an issue with the FBX animation, when the clip is changing the startup position of the fbx clip are different. How can I solve it?

Thank you for your support!



This is how I edited the FBX mocap from Mixamo, I'd never touch the position and I don't now how to modify the position and rotation of the clips..

simple question but how do you rotate a GU_detail? like the same as gdp->translate()

Hi,
Anyone has a suggestion to make the attached UV map cleaner? Thanks!

I am trying to create crowd simulations and wondered if it's possible to manually generate sims for crowd from existing anim data?

I have per-frame (or per agent) joint animation generated from another DCC (Massive) which I want to use to instance and render my agents from

is it at all possible to convert the joint anim from another dcc for crowds and apply it onto a crowd of houdini agents?

I can create a matching agent to the hierarchy I made in Massive, I also have a pointcloud of attributes (such as geo variations) and transforms I can use with a crowdsource to position my agents. But I need some way to get the per-agent joint animation from the source sim data

Am I able to manually set agent's joint transforms and then write out to a traditional houdini crowd sim?

Hey, I have a RBD sim cached to disk and im using transform pieces and then deform pieces. I need to tweak a couple of the sim points / pieces to make the final mesh look better. I cant figure out how to add transforms to the points... $CEX,y,z does not work, its offset from the actual sim points. Any help appreciated.

Hello;
I seemed to hit a wall after trying out many options to make PDG / google Cloud combo work without a VPN
I have cloud instances on google.
I have a hqueue server and hqueue client visible to each other.
Machines behind google cloud and local have no firewall running
Ports like 37800 37801 explicitly opened from google cloud interface (ingress and engress) and also port forwarded to the instance.

Regular hqueue submissions are able to work.
I can`t make PDG Scheduler work. I believe its an msq server problem
AFAIK , I need msq ports open on both ends.Since this is over cloud I will assume msq needs to run over external IPs.

by default i get time-out error
and this is what it says in Houdini hqueuescheduler

Failed to start the Message Queue Job
RuntimeError: Failed to make outgoing connection to Message Queue at port 37801. Check your firewall or VPN rules.
gaierror: No address associated with hostname

If I run msq manually on both machines /opt/hfs18.5/bin/mqserver -i EXTERNALIP -s -p 37800 -n 1024 -l 2 -w 37801 1024 result

I get
error: Address already in use

using PDGMQ_USE_IP = 1 at task env Variable changes the error message to

RuntimeError: Failed to make outgoing connection to Message Queue at port 37801: Timed out
Check your firewall or VPN rules.

Is there a way to run this without a VPN, what am I doing wrong ? Any pointers ?

Thanks
tim

Hi!
why when I create a top network to make my wedges,
I absolutely have to restart my Houdini when I get to the "ROP Composite Output" step?

oddly, if I don't restart my houdini, I have an error at each end of the frame of all my wedges,
I tried on several different scenes, same problem, without restarting houdini, same problem, is there a way to get past this problem?

thank you

hi,
i tried Houdini Engine for 3dsMax.
SideFx shows some presentation for some DCC.
that's simply about as SOP-Modeling.

I'm wonder, can i get all Houdini tools on 3dsMax through Houdini engine?
example,
*)set alembic file for emitter geometry
*)executing DOP, POP and Pyro, Fluid
*)caching geo with bgeo-format or alembic
and so on.
OR, simply modeling SOP only?
attachment picture shows simple example.

i try above contents, but i cannot get them any yet.
i cannot find any parameters on the HDA in 3dsMax.
i want to see clearly this.

thanks

Heya

I'm having some issues running the python SOP node as i would have thought it would.
I've managed to get a kinect to run inside of Houdini off a Python SOP node.
The process is multithreaded using QT and i'm trying to update the position of my points.
The hou.setPosition is running inside a while loop which is off the main thread so Houdinis UI doesnt freeze and is uneffected.

The issue i'm struggling to figure out is that inside this while loop the position of the points don't update in real time. I can click on a null node connected to the python node below it and the position updates and vise versa if i click onto the python node its self.
And after the setPosition function runs the timeline is increased as well. I've not tried keyframing yet as i would have already expected the setPosition to have worked already.

Does the python node only really update attributes after it's "finished" and in this instance by rendering the null under it the python node has technically "finished" cooking?

Just to add to this. I've continued to look more into the setting of the attributes and watching the geometry spreadsheet it looks like the values ARE changing and animating but the scene view doesnt seem to update. i've tried to have the attributes become a detail instead of setting the point positions and set the detail attrib to the point pos within a solver node. That didnt seem to work either :/
I've also tried putting 2 inputs into a switch node and have it switch values every frame with $F%2. Sadly it seems that physically clicking on a node is my current method to update the viewport. And i found theres a triggerUpdate() function but that doesnt give much luck either.

I had found this post talking about a hdefereval lib.
https://forums.odforce.net/topic/22570-execute-in-main-thread-with-results/ [forums.odforce.net]
I tried using the executeInMainThreadWithResult and it's able to print my debug prints and is also setting the point pos but not updating the ui. The main thing that differs from my code and the example code in the odfoce post is that mine is running QThread instead of threading. But i've not been able to find any info regarding the hdefereval lib online.