Do caustics work with sun lights in H13? I can't get caustics to show up with sun but they work with point light type.

Edit: I can set up a second point light that is in the same location as the sun light then exclude this light from the render and it works nicely. Would be great to get it from the sun itself though!

So now I'm trying to use proximityPoint to get a collection of primitives around the point. However, I'm getting a segfault with this - ideas? Not sure if I'm doing the right thing with the GU_ProximityHelper?


GU_RayIntersect rint(gdp);
UT_Array<GU_MinInfo> hitList;
const GU_ProximityHelper* proxyHelp;
rint.proximityPoint(hitList, UT_Vector3(0.0,1.0,0.0), true, proxyHelp, 1.0);

for (auto i = hitList.begin(); i != hitList.end(); ++i)
{
i.item().prim()->computeNormal(); // Just see if we can access the prim
}

Ah, found a good answer here: http://forums.odforce.net/topic/12691-closest-point-on-the-primitive/?p=79743 [forums.odforce.net]

Thanks!

Yea thanks for the tips, definitely making sure to only build the tree once

Works well!

Do you know if there's similar functionality for faces? I'd like to find the closest face and its normal to a given point.

Thank you! I'll be posting more as I get them finished over the next few weeks.

Excellent, thanks Graham!

Hi, sorry for the newbie question but I've been looking for how to do this for quite a while now!

In the HDK, how do I find the number of the closest point in my gdp to a world position? For example, I want to find the number of the point in my geometry that is closest to position (1,2,3).

I have seen the classes like UT_PointTree, but I can't for the life of me get them initialized properly. Anyone have an example?

Hi everyone,

I have created a procedural fire escape asset in Houdini. Been pretty into procedural modeling lately! I have uploaded the results to my website as well as Vimeo. I'll be uploading some more Houdini stuff over the next few weeks. Would love to get your thoughts!

www.kmcnamara.com

https://vimeo.com/81299197 [vimeo.com]

Gotcha. Since the documentation mentions that you need to change the stamp names I guess I didn't consider it a bug, but I totally see what you mean with the scopes.

Bumping the thread up - anyone have any ideas on how to get around this permission denied error?

Thanks

I just want to reiterate that this is not a bug with the foreach SOP. As we mentioned in your other thread, you just need to change the names of the stamp values when you have nested loops. I downloaded your file, did that, and the door creation works just fine - i was able to make four doors no problem. I have attached the file for you.

I agree that there are simpler solutions to what you're doing. Have a look at the procedural modeling tutorials that cover buildings. They are very straightforward:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=222&Itemid=383 [sidefx.com]

In windows task manager, go to the ‘Processes’ tab and right click on the mantra.exe task. You should see ‘Set Affinity’ (just below ‘Set Priority’ ). Click ‘Set Affinity’ and you will get a popup window that allows you to select which processors you want to allow mantra to use.

Yes - to confirm, I opened up your file and both of your loops are using “FORVALUE” and “FORIDXVALUE”, so they will be overwriting each other's iterators. You will want to change both stamp names on at least one of the loops (I usually just tag a little identifier on the end). Not sure if there are other bugs in your scene, but that is definitely one.

Thanks edward. Now I'm getting the following error:

/cygdrive/c/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.21/bin/hexpand: Permission denied.

Any ideas on that? I tried running cygwin in administrator mode but no luck

Hi, I'm trying to examine a hip file with hexpand, but when I run the command in cygwin, I get the following error.

Command:
“C:\Program Files\Side Effects Software\Houdini 13.0.198.21\bin\hexpand” cusers/kevin/desktop/test.hip

Error:
—————-
hcpio: Command not found.
test.hip does not seem to be a hip file.
—————–

However, test.hip is a valid hip file - opens in Houdini just fine.

I'm running windows 7, Houdini 13.0.198

Any ideas?
Thanks

SOLVED:

Finally found the problem! After two days of trying all odds and ends we finally did a trace on hcmd.exe on both my machine and a good machine. We found that the broken machine was loading “Forefront TMG ClientFwcWsp64.dll”. After uninstalling the Forefront Client and its patches/updates and a system restart, the problem was solved!

The Houdini splash screen now comes up instantly, command line tools come up instantly, code compiles in 12 seconds instead of 70, and obj's no longer have a 20 second delay on import. Yay.

So, long story short, get rid of Forefront if you’re seeing any of those problems. Thanks to those who offered ideas.

With the combination of a script that compiles+opens Houdini, iteration time has gone from about 2 minutes down to 15 seconds

Update: I ran some tests on other computers that are connected to the same network hub and none of them have this big delay issue. So it looks like the problem is with my actual machine, although it could still involve licenses. Any ideas? Guess the issue is back open

Yup - we're thinking the same. Trying a handful of debugging tests and I'll let you know how it goes.

If anyone has any insights on the inlinecpp compile error I posted above, please let me know!

Thanks for the replies. Using inlinecpp will be a good idea for most cases, so I'll do that. However, I have two issues:

Whenever I try to use inlinecpp.createLibrary I get a “fatal error LNK1104” saying that it can't open the library file that it's trying to create. Any ideas what's going wrong? I get this even when entering the code in the first example http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/hom/extendingwithcpp [sidefx.com]

Second, whether calling hcustom through the command line tools or calling inlinecpp.createLibrary, my computer is taking over 70 seconds to compile even the most basic code. This seems way too long. Is there something wrong with my setup that I might be able to debug? My system is a 6-core 3.2Ghz, 16Gb RAM, so I don't think it's the hardware. :?

Thanks for the help

EDIT: It is also suspicious that it takes over 20 seconds for the splash screen to display after hitting the Houdini icon. Could these be related?

EDIT: I also have a delay of almost exactly 20 seconds when importing an OBJ. I watch the performance monitor and nothing happens until a CPU spike at 20 seconds and the model loads right then.

Problem has been solved, see post marked SOLVED for solution.

Hi,

I am compiling HDK plugins using hcustom and it takes quite a while even for the most basic nodes. I also have to restart Houdini to register the new changes (or at least have Houdini closed for hcustom to compile successfully).

Thus, any time I want to change any code, the iteration to do so takes at least 2-3 minutes from when I hit compile just to see my change in action. While this seems petty, this really slows down development time compared to Python or VEX where I can see changes almost instantly.

I suppose that's one of the tradeoffs for the power of the HDK but does anyone have any tips on how to speed things up?

Thanks!