Hey guys! great to see this come online!! congrats!!

one thing I cannot seem to find is the old daily build download page (which shows multiple versions/builds of Houdini available to download). Is there a way to reach that page or is it still under construction?

thank you!

Hey Andrew! thank you for this! this is very useful

Looking forward to your docs too. Are those going to be part of the Houdini documentation or a separate plug in doc altogether?

Here is a tutorial Playlist I made where I try to teach houdini in a way that helps understand the application paradigms a bit better

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjOCJrhSBGUG9uqJ2rMe6ByLJcTD9Jau7&app=desktop [youtube.com]

This is also mostly focused on procedural content creation and games. Given that I also have a background in Maya, I try to also bridge the concepts a bit

Hope it helps!

Hey guys, in a previous post, when multiple UV sets were implemented, this was noted:

If a mesh is inputted into Houdini Engine, the original Maya UV names are stored in a set of detail attributes (maya_uv_name and maya_uv_mapped_uv). When the mesh is outputted back into Maya, these detail attributes are used to name the output UVs. This should preserve the original names of the original UVs.

I have two questions:

a- If there are no UV Sets coming from maya, and I add UVSets in Houdini, can I use these attributes to determine how to name my houdini generated UV Sets in Maya? or does it just work with incoming UV Sets?

b- what are the equivalent detail attribute names for color sets? (are these documented anywhere?)

Thank you!

Hey Damian, thank you, I will try to put one together as soon as possible

here is a way how you can go about doing so (and you can wrap this up into a digital asset)

there are a few notes in the hip file explaining what I did

let me know if you have any questions!

one that may get you close too is VDB to spheres. Try creating a polygon box, do VDB from polygons, then VDB to spheres

I know in the maya plug in, rops and cops are both easily supported to trigger renders and such from the host application. In maya, there is a small catch that, if you are not outputting geometry, you do have do to a force sync to trigger the render

Hey Damian, it appears to happen both in game view and scene view. I would be OK with only Game View respecting the setting, but it would be nice if this matched the maya behaviour (and object visibility in Houdini simply was reflected in Unity via the visibility tag)

thank you!

Hi, I have an OBJ asset which I am loading in unity. This OBJ asset is a subnet containing a few geos, some which are invisible (for processing), and some which are visible (for output). However, I noticed that in unity, when loading this asset, all objects are visible. This is different from the Maya behaviour where hidden objects do not show up

Is there a way to make the unity asset hide meshes which are hidden in Houdini?

thank you!

Hi, sorry for reviving this old thread, but was wondering about this very question

Is it possible to setup the unity environment to look for assets in other locations? In the maya plug in, one can define this environment (similar to how it is done in Houdini) via the HAPI_OTL_PATH env variable. Is there an equivalent for unity?

thank you!

I think the reason for the lack of press is because the plugin is still in beta. You can actually post comments (and download) from this forum, as well as check out updates

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?board=47.0 [forum.allegorithmic.com]

I recommend downloading it and trying it out, then providing some feedback. It works out quite well for being in beta state!

lol good catch man and good to know. Thank you as usual for addressing this promptly!

Not a problem! Thank you for fixing this so promptly!

What causes this on some operators if you do not mind me asking?

This is indeed awesome news! This is going to open a lot of doors on interactive work flows

I guess your approach is more accurate than a simple attribute transfer precisely because of the way the XYZDistance node samples the primitives?

yup! XYZDistance gets any attribute (point/prim/vertex) at the interpolated value of a fragment of the primitive which is really nice!

Maybe SideFX should update the attribute transfer SOP? Wink

I believe if you want a SOP close equivalent, that would be the Ray SOP for each of the geo sampling VOPs, I have found these to be close SOP equivalents (albeit some slight differences such as the specific kernel methods of attribute transfer, and the ability of Point Cloud Open to filter the query by normals) :

- Attribute Transfer SOP ~= Point Cloud Open VOP (with PC Filter) or Point Cloud Find

- Ray SOP (in Project Rays Method and a single sample) ~= Intersect VOP

- Ray SOP (in Minimun Distance Method) ~= XYZDistance VOP

I tend to favor the VOP ones just because of their multithreading and more atomical controls, but sometimes I do still use Ray and Attribute Transfer depending on what I am doing

it seems to have to do with new assets for some reason:

using houdini engine 15.0.347

print.otl will actually return the node name when instantiated with pm.houdiniAsset()

digitalAssetMaya_Maya does not work

digitalAssetMaya_Maya was created with a more recent version of Houdini (15.0.424) whereas print.otl is one of our older assets.

are you able to repro this? (using Maya 2015x64)

thank you!

hi! up to this point, the houdiniAsset command has successfully returned the name of the node created, but I ran into a case where it seems to fail to do so (The node is created, but the command simply returns None). Is there a known case where this may be happening? I am trying to dig into why this is the case. The only difference in between my assets is that one is an OBJ .otl, and the other one is a SOP .hda

thank you!

Hey DASD, I did notice in my message I said to use bind to import class into the vop, but in reality you have to use get attribute with the prim num been feed into it as class (or island) is a primitive attribute sorry about that!

I added a few extra comments:

- you still need to transfer class to the VDB mesh in this method

- you should still use XYZDistance to do so on a prim vop as this is faster and more accurate than attribute transfer

- your point vop should be a vertex vop since your uvs are on vertices and not points

Included the file with the new method! let me know if you have any questions

Another approach which has worked quite a bit for me (which may be a bit faster than the forloop method) is (inside of a point or vertex vop) to use XYZDistance VOP, and use the original UV island ID as a group filter in the group input plug. This will filter the XYZ distance query with only faces which contain that attribute (use a bind VOP to bring the original uv island attribute, then feed it to the first input of a print VOP with the following string: @someIslandAttrib==%, and feed the string output of the print VOP into the group input of the XYZDistance)

After that, feed the primitive number and UV intersection location (not to be confused with your UV attribute) into a Primitive Attribute VOP, and have it return the UV attribute at the intersection point.

This method also has the advantage that it returns the UVs at fragment locations of polygons (at a primitive's U and V position) and its very fast

Since group inputs have been added to several vops, this has removed many reasons to have to forloop things!