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Solaris and Karma » Importing multiple Objects as components for instancing
- Fele
- 36 posts
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I tried a bit more... The problem alway is the instanceable reference.. As soon this is checked, it won't accept the materials...
Solaris and Karma » Importing multiple Objects as components for instancing
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hello!
I am still trying to export USD files with instances and multi-materials.
So far I got everything working except I had to use "referenceable instances" because 3dsmax (or any other software) aren't importing the point instances correctly..
When using referenceable geometry, it seems to be a lot more complicated to create instances with multi-materials...
The only way I got this working was by merging to "create sop" nodes, which returns separate objects which the instancer can use..
Of course I don't want to manually create sops and merging them, so I created an for each loop which fetches at each iteration another piece which I want to add to the instancer, which picks them by name attribute.... But I am doing this for thousands of objects which gets really slow and feels too complicated. And if things weren't complicated enough - i looks like the objects can't be imported as packed geometry because this won't allow me to assign materials based on the shop_materialpath partition...
The whole thing would work if I tell the instancer to use the entire stage, but for this I need to import the objects properly like the two manually created and merged objects.
Would be great I anyone knew how to do this properly
Cheers
Felix
I am still trying to export USD files with instances and multi-materials.
So far I got everything working except I had to use "referenceable instances" because 3dsmax (or any other software) aren't importing the point instances correctly..
When using referenceable geometry, it seems to be a lot more complicated to create instances with multi-materials...
The only way I got this working was by merging to "create sop" nodes, which returns separate objects which the instancer can use..
Of course I don't want to manually create sops and merging them, so I created an for each loop which fetches at each iteration another piece which I want to add to the instancer, which picks them by name attribute.... But I am doing this for thousands of objects which gets really slow and feels too complicated. And if things weren't complicated enough - i looks like the objects can't be imported as packed geometry because this won't allow me to assign materials based on the shop_materialpath partition...
The whole thing would work if I tell the instancer to use the entire stage, but for this I need to import the objects properly like the two manually created and merged objects.
Would be great I anyone knew how to do this properly
Cheers
Felix
Solaris and Karma » Multi-Material USD - what's wrong here?
- Fele
- 36 posts
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Okay I finally figured it out...
It looks there is an issue with the "familyName" of the subsets... Apparently this needs to be set to "materialBind", so instead of using the @shop_material attribute as partition for the groups I created a primitive attribute on SOP level (s@materialBind = s@shop_materialpath) and used this...
It looks there is an issue with the "familyName" of the subsets... Apparently this needs to be set to "materialBind", so instead of using the @shop_material attribute as partition for the groups I created a primitive attribute on SOP level (s@materialBind = s@shop_materialpath) and used this...
Solaris and Karma » Multi-Material USD - what's wrong here?
- Fele
- 36 posts
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Hello, after searching for almost two days for a solution, I give up...
I have a usd file, exported from 3dsmax with one object which shows up in Houdini as expected with two materials.
When I import this file back into 3dsmax or Maya everything is fine and I get the two materials.
But when I try to build the same setup in Houdini, none of the materials show up in 3dsmax or Maya.
So I tried comparing the max-usd export to the houdini-usd to find out what's wrong but I have no idea.
My guess is that the assignment has to be done a bit different from what I am doing. (For whatever reason it works with only one material assigned...)
I also figured out that max/maya only eat their own export correctly by using the USD-Preview Shader...
I uploaded the three files, hoping that somebody could help me to figure out the difference or how to set it up correctly.
Thanks
Felix
I have a usd file, exported from 3dsmax with one object which shows up in Houdini as expected with two materials.
When I import this file back into 3dsmax or Maya everything is fine and I get the two materials.
But when I try to build the same setup in Houdini, none of the materials show up in 3dsmax or Maya.
So I tried comparing the max-usd export to the houdini-usd to find out what's wrong but I have no idea.
My guess is that the assignment has to be done a bit different from what I am doing. (For whatever reason it works with only one material assigned...)
I also figured out that max/maya only eat their own export correctly by using the USD-Preview Shader...
I uploaded the three files, hoping that somebody could help me to figure out the difference or how to set it up correctly.
Thanks
Felix
Edited by Fele - Oct. 16, 2021 04:00:00
Technical Discussion » Export USD with multiple Materials per piece
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Ok it turns out I was on the wrong track doing the all packing/instancing in SOPs. The better way seems to be doing this in the stage network...
Edited by Fele - Oct. 15, 2021 07:38:57
Technical Discussion » Export USD with multiple Materials per piece
- Fele
- 36 posts
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jsmack
I looked at your scene and 'partition attributes' was disabled, bypassing geomsubset creation. This is required for per-face material assignments.
Thanks a lot jsmack!
At first it looked like the materials got lost while importing the USD into 3dsmax but it is caused by the 3dsmax usd importer, blender works just fine...
Do you maybe also know how to do this with packed & instanced geometry?
Technical Discussion » Export USD with multiple Materials per piece
- Fele
- 36 posts
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I am currently trying to export USD with basic shader assignments. This kind of works it fails when it comes to multiple materials per piece like illustrated in the image below.
One workaround could be to split up the mesh but I want to avoid that because will be dealing with a lot of instanced geometries later on...
I found these two links regarding this issue, but none of them helped to get to the correct result...
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/71209/ [www.sidefx.com]
https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php? [www.tokeru.com]
Thanks
Felix
One workaround could be to split up the mesh but I want to avoid that because will be dealing with a lot of instanced geometries later on...
I found these two links regarding this issue, but none of them helped to get to the correct result...
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/71209/ [www.sidefx.com]
https://www.tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php? [www.tokeru.com]
Thanks
Felix
Edited by Fele - Oct. 14, 2021 13:27:16
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » array: remove same values?
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
I was just looking for vex solution and found this thread...
Just in case anyone else is looking for this, maybe here is another, shorter solution:
Another way could be to assign a value like "0" to the duplicate values instead of removing..
Just in case anyone else is looking for this, maybe here is another, shorter solution:
f[]@myarray = {1,1,1,2,2,3,4,5,5,5,6,7,7,7,8,8,9}; float current; float next; for(int i = len(@myarray); i > -1; i--) { current = @myarray[i]; next = @myarray[i-1]; if(current == next) { removeindex(@myarray, i); } }
Another way could be to assign a value like "0" to the duplicate values instead of removing..
Edited by Fele - Sept. 29, 2021 07:41:33
Technical Discussion » Imorted CAD Data: extracting Transforms from mirrored/similar Geometry
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hello,
I am currently working with some CAD Data and I noticed an issue with mirrored geometry which is probably happens
during converting CAD files into poly: An object which has been mirrored inside the CAD application ends up with the exact same point/primitive count but with a different winding/point order. An identical, non-mirrored object allows me to do an extract transform which gives me the exact position/rotation of the clones, so they can be replaced later on. Even though I know that the mirrored objects are basically identical except they have been "flipped", I am not able to extract transforms because of the different point order and a slightly different tessellation which probably depends on their orientation in worldspace. (but like I said, the overall surface and the point/prim numbers still are identical..)
I was wondering if there is a different way to get the transform information of these objects while comparing these to a non-mirrored object. Moritz from Entagma pointed me in the direction of Shape DNA and spectral shape matching, but this way above me skills...
I was thinking of something like the "sum of all normals" turned into a vector..? but I guess it would be necessary to this in some kind of local space (which I don't have...)
I messed around with the measure node and laplacian paramater which in some cases allowed me to sort the points in proximity to common position but I guess this was just stupid luck...
I attached a sample file with an imported geometry which also has been mirrored - If anyone has an idea about that, please let me know.
Thanks
Felix
I am currently working with some CAD Data and I noticed an issue with mirrored geometry which is probably happens
during converting CAD files into poly: An object which has been mirrored inside the CAD application ends up with the exact same point/primitive count but with a different winding/point order. An identical, non-mirrored object allows me to do an extract transform which gives me the exact position/rotation of the clones, so they can be replaced later on. Even though I know that the mirrored objects are basically identical except they have been "flipped", I am not able to extract transforms because of the different point order and a slightly different tessellation which probably depends on their orientation in worldspace. (but like I said, the overall surface and the point/prim numbers still are identical..)
I was wondering if there is a different way to get the transform information of these objects while comparing these to a non-mirrored object. Moritz from Entagma pointed me in the direction of Shape DNA and spectral shape matching, but this way above me skills...
I was thinking of something like the "sum of all normals" turned into a vector..? but I guess it would be necessary to this in some kind of local space (which I don't have...)
I messed around with the measure node and laplacian paramater which in some cases allowed me to sort the points in proximity to common position but I guess this was just stupid luck...
I attached a sample file with an imported geometry which also has been mirrored - If anyone has an idea about that, please let me know.
Thanks
Felix
Edited by Fele - Aug. 23, 2021 12:55:25
Houdini Engine for Unreal » Building Complete Shader graph in Houdini?
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hello!
Have lots of fairly simple Materials which I would like to create in Houdini instead of Unreal for automatization purposes…
I went through some tutorials and I am basically getting my materials in UE, but I am not quite sure for example, how to create:
- Base color = “Texture Map multiplied with a another color.” (Houdini only allows to assign a texture or a color. And how can I prevent unreal from multiplying the color with a vertex color node in the UE material…?)
- Other Parameters like roughness etc only work if I type in a float into actual textbox, it does not use connected nodes…
And also I am not sure if this is a bug, but as soon I start changing the reflectivity (for specular), Unreal does not use the value, instead its using the base color(??)
Cheers
Felix
Have lots of fairly simple Materials which I would like to create in Houdini instead of Unreal for automatization purposes…
I went through some tutorials and I am basically getting my materials in UE, but I am not quite sure for example, how to create:
- Base color = “Texture Map multiplied with a another color.” (Houdini only allows to assign a texture or a color. And how can I prevent unreal from multiplying the color with a vertex color node in the UE material…?)
- Other Parameters like roughness etc only work if I type in a float into actual textbox, it does not use connected nodes…
And also I am not sure if this is a bug, but as soon I start changing the reflectivity (for specular), Unreal does not use the value, instead its using the base color(??)
Cheers
Felix
Technical Discussion » How To Match Translation Multi Select objects To Another Object
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
not sure if I understood correctly, but if you want to apply the grid's tranform to the box or the tube, have a look at the file attached.
Technical Discussion » Remove occluded/unseen primitives / light map baking - how?
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
I am currently optimizing complex CAD 3d models with a lot of faces which are occluded/not visible. The goals are a lower polycount and an optimized UV layout for light maps inside unreal - so they only use actually need geometry.
Someone on discord recommended the occlusion sop or the “remove inside faces” from Houdini labs. These tools work for easy geo, but they have a lot of problems with more complex data - just like my approach. (Somewhat similar to these tools)
I tried shooting “primary and secondary rays” from a sphere, surrounding the cad model. Every cad primitive that gets intersected shoots another pair of rays to check for other “outside” primitives which did not get intersected by the first ray - because they could be located in between two objects…
Then I remove all primitives which didn't get intersected by any ray. This works quite okay but sometimes it needs a lot of samples and if I oversample the whole thing, I end up with a lot of faces that shouldn't be there…
I was wondering if there might be another way - a colleague recommended to texture bake a bright environment light/shadows and to generate point color by these rendered textures. Then to remove all primitives that rendered completely black.
I want to test that but the texture Baker sops don't offer any light maps and further I am not sure how to loop that routine over multiple groups… (same with redshift…)
If anybody has an idea or done something like that, it would be great to get some help.
Of course any other idea is welcome…
Thanks
Felix
Someone on discord recommended the occlusion sop or the “remove inside faces” from Houdini labs. These tools work for easy geo, but they have a lot of problems with more complex data - just like my approach. (Somewhat similar to these tools)
I tried shooting “primary and secondary rays” from a sphere, surrounding the cad model. Every cad primitive that gets intersected shoots another pair of rays to check for other “outside” primitives which did not get intersected by the first ray - because they could be located in between two objects…
Then I remove all primitives which didn't get intersected by any ray. This works quite okay but sometimes it needs a lot of samples and if I oversample the whole thing, I end up with a lot of faces that shouldn't be there…
I was wondering if there might be another way - a colleague recommended to texture bake a bright environment light/shadows and to generate point color by these rendered textures. Then to remove all primitives that rendered completely black.
I want to test that but the texture Baker sops don't offer any light maps and further I am not sure how to loop that routine over multiple groups… (same with redshift…)
If anybody has an idea or done something like that, it would be great to get some help.
Of course any other idea is welcome…
Thanks
Felix
Edited by Fele - July 24, 2020 18:43:10
Houdini Engine for Unreal » Mesh Lightmap Resolution Settings
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
In case anybody else is also looking for a solution:
Instead of using unreal_lightmap_resolution use the Uproperty
unreal_uproperty_LightMapResolution
Explained further down here…
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unreal/_attributes.html [www.sidefx.com]
Instead of using unreal_lightmap_resolution use the Uproperty
unreal_uproperty_LightMapResolution
Explained further down here…
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unreal/_attributes.html [www.sidefx.com]
Houdini Learning Materials » Frustration Threshold
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hello there,
I am still pretty new to Houdini, but its getting more and more frustrating as I try to get more into detail with stuff that i've been doing very intuitive for while inside 3dsmax/thinking particles. I know, it is a totally different level and a much more complex concept, but it feels like the learning cuve and furstation tolerance are almost at water level.
Every day I run into small stupid problems/questions which are just exhausting to figure out.
For example, why are there VEX functions like “arraylength” which are only available inside a VOP but not in a pointwrangle. And vice versa for the function “nearpoints”. A lot of the stuff is very poorly documented, especially vop nodes and it takes a lot of time to find the right one as well as the right way to use it. When I recently asked a software developer to help me, to get a pointvop running, he looked into it, looked into the documentation, got angry and said: “sorry but this sucks”. And in addition to that, a lot of tutorials have become kind of outdated since a lot has changed in the software during the last years.
Not sure, is it just me or are more people out there having similar difficulties getting into the software?
How do you guys do it?
Is there a kind of debugging tool to check out whats going on inside a network? (I recently tried to write a random number into an attribute a pointvop using “random”, but I ended up with just the same random number for each point without beeing able to find out why..)
Are there any tutorials/trainings you can recommend, especially for basic stuff like vops and fundamental stuff?
Sure there are a lot of great workshops and tutorials out there, but a lot of them are just scratching the surface of different topics without going into detail. And in my opinion, there is no point in setting up fancy fluid simulations or pyro renderings without an in depth understanding of whats going on. Without that, there is now way to really push the boundaries which we usually run into with other software packages.
Cheers
Felix
I am still pretty new to Houdini, but its getting more and more frustrating as I try to get more into detail with stuff that i've been doing very intuitive for while inside 3dsmax/thinking particles. I know, it is a totally different level and a much more complex concept, but it feels like the learning cuve and furstation tolerance are almost at water level.
Every day I run into small stupid problems/questions which are just exhausting to figure out.
For example, why are there VEX functions like “arraylength” which are only available inside a VOP but not in a pointwrangle. And vice versa for the function “nearpoints”. A lot of the stuff is very poorly documented, especially vop nodes and it takes a lot of time to find the right one as well as the right way to use it. When I recently asked a software developer to help me, to get a pointvop running, he looked into it, looked into the documentation, got angry and said: “sorry but this sucks”. And in addition to that, a lot of tutorials have become kind of outdated since a lot has changed in the software during the last years.
Not sure, is it just me or are more people out there having similar difficulties getting into the software?
How do you guys do it?
Is there a kind of debugging tool to check out whats going on inside a network? (I recently tried to write a random number into an attribute a pointvop using “random”, but I ended up with just the same random number for each point without beeing able to find out why..)
Are there any tutorials/trainings you can recommend, especially for basic stuff like vops and fundamental stuff?
Sure there are a lot of great workshops and tutorials out there, but a lot of them are just scratching the surface of different topics without going into detail. And in my opinion, there is no point in setting up fancy fluid simulations or pyro renderings without an in depth understanding of whats going on. Without that, there is now way to really push the boundaries which we usually run into with other software packages.
Cheers
Felix
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Houdini download form broken
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hi there,
I just noticed that it is not possible do download the apprentice version of houdini because the form within the customize tab does not respond.
Cheers
Felix
I just noticed that it is not possible do download the apprentice version of houdini because the form within the customize tab does not respond.
Cheers
Felix
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » New to Houdini - couple of questions/issues..
- Fele
- 36 posts
- Offline
Hello Everyone,
I am a 3dsmax user, trying to switch to Houdini (probably in a few years.. ) and a few weeks ago I started with the SideFX basic lessons.
While working through the tutorials, I ran into a few issues/questions and I was hoping to find some answers here
#1
I noticed that the backtick "`“ does not work with a German keyboard in most cases. For example it does not work in the expression editor or the parameter pane text boxes but it does work in the ”most used parameters“ text boxes above the viewport.
#2
Sometimes the Houdini GUI stops responding but only half way. Its still possible to tumble in the viewport but everything else is unclickable. When I try to quit Houdini, the ”save changes dialog" appears, but it's also impossible to click it (also not by keyboard..) I managed to restore it a few times by mini-/maximizing Houdini or switching viewports, but most of the time I had to kill it by windows taskmanager.
#3
How can i enable autobackup by default? The manual tells me that the autosave function always resets after restart..
#4
Sometimes the expression editor stops helping/suggesting the syntax.. Is there a switch I accidentally hit every time?
#5
3dsMax - thinkingParticles brought me to Houdini and there was a nice way to debug/visualize the result of parameters or expressions. is there similar way in Houdini to do this?
http://keichan102.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/sky-high-nest/image/DebugBasicIntro.jpg [keichan102.sakura.ne.jp]
Thanks and best regards
Felix
I am a 3dsmax user, trying to switch to Houdini (probably in a few years.. ) and a few weeks ago I started with the SideFX basic lessons.
While working through the tutorials, I ran into a few issues/questions and I was hoping to find some answers here
#1
I noticed that the backtick "`“ does not work with a German keyboard in most cases. For example it does not work in the expression editor or the parameter pane text boxes but it does work in the ”most used parameters“ text boxes above the viewport.
#2
Sometimes the Houdini GUI stops responding but only half way. Its still possible to tumble in the viewport but everything else is unclickable. When I try to quit Houdini, the ”save changes dialog" appears, but it's also impossible to click it (also not by keyboard..) I managed to restore it a few times by mini-/maximizing Houdini or switching viewports, but most of the time I had to kill it by windows taskmanager.
#3
How can i enable autobackup by default? The manual tells me that the autosave function always resets after restart..
#4
Sometimes the expression editor stops helping/suggesting the syntax.. Is there a switch I accidentally hit every time?
#5
3dsMax - thinkingParticles brought me to Houdini and there was a nice way to debug/visualize the result of parameters or expressions. is there similar way in Houdini to do this?
http://keichan102.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/sky-high-nest/image/DebugBasicIntro.jpg [keichan102.sakura.ne.jp]
Thanks and best regards
Felix
Edited by - April 7, 2014 07:51:34
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