craiglhoffman
If I can just get Joystick input into Houdini my demo will be way cooler (see MIDI In question in Technical Discussion).
Craig Hoffman

I am probably wrong but as far as I remember I think there is a joystick CHOP in the proto-install. Or it used to be?????
Just guessing probably

mrice
I have a material that can blend different surfaces. The idea is that its a layer on top of vops which takes care of the adding/naming/promoting/connecting stuff for you.

link [audenmedia.com]

Lemme know if you have any suggestions

Man this material is really good, probably is the most advanced material I've ever seen for Mantra.
Really good!

All the bells and whistles of a message passing render engine.
Not being a closed solution as vray has it pros
By the way, cool render serg.
Is amazing the crazy things you can do playing with the raytracing engine using tyhe gather statement.

Really cool image orr!
For me seems like slices from a volume.
I am imaging this with an animated procedural noise, can get cool shapes.

Quite intersting mate, thanks for sharing

Ok I know, any kind of comparasion between software are usually a flameware and not really accurate.
But in my day by day work with Houdini one of my biggest bottleneck is the viewport.
It is still really slowwwww, even in the latest H10 version in Linux.
When you look at how the new softimage viewport performs, really I envy these guys:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/mnevideo/softimage_2010_new_features_video/softimage_2010_features_1300x860.html [download.autodesk.com]
Hopefully one day we also have a faster viewport like many other apps nowdays.
Just a though ….

Message passing using categories in the illuminace loop??
the problem with this is that you need to modify the shader to get it working.

Hi SESI
I have just checked in H10.0.249 and there is something that I miss a lot and in my openion is not so hard to get done.
Why there still aren't any docs showing the class hiearchy for the HOM module.
Sometimes ones lose a lot of time just guessing the relationship between different classes in HOM, when just with a graph showing this hierarchy and with links to every class doc would be really useful.
Many coding docs tools, and I believe at SESI this is used, just do it out of the box, so please will be possible to add this to the docs.
thx

Antoine Durr

lisux
The thing I really want to avoid is the double work of doing macros/scripts from one wiki format to another, is not really a problem to embeed the output of SESIWiki into an other wiki or doc system, cos at the end everything is html.

Yeah, sure you can do it statically, but the challenge is to do it dynamically, i.e. so that a user can edit the raw text via a wiki rather than a file stuck in some particular location on some particular disk.

The key thing is how to use the wiki engine used by Houdini for your own pourposes. So you can do two things:
Having a text file in SESIWiki format convert it to html
Having a site, for instance, the studio intranet, how to use the SESIWiki into it so people can directly write Houdini inhouse tools docs in the SESIWiki format and keep a consistency with the Houdini docs
Another useful thing will be in the case you can get a html file, as you have said with the output from othe wikis, how to make an operator help to use this file instead of the help embeebed into the HDA.
Basically I would be happy if the SESIWiki could be used outside of Houdini, as an stand alone wiki, this will help a lot for studios and 3rd party developers to write docs for Houdini custom tools.

The SESIwiki is a javascript implementation of an OSS text-file-to-html converter. If hacking the existing setup to do it again in that mode isn't doable, I'm sure it would make a good RFE for SESI.

Yep seems to be based on these projects:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/ [daringfireball.net]
http://attacklab.net/showdown/ [attacklab.net]
But the sintax used in SESIWiki is different.
Also the perl version of markdown can be use from the command line, can I do the same with the javascript version shipped with Houdini?

Antoine Durr
If you figure this out, let me know! I've been trying to figure out exactly the same thing for a while, and basically gave up.
The fundamental problem is that the houdini-wiki expects text, wiki text to be specific. If you have your own wiki, e.g. TWiki, Tiki Wiki, MediaWiki, etc. the output of that is html, not plain text.
I suppose if you could make a theme for your helpcard wiki pages (I'm defining a theme to be css + text->html processing) that deliberately skips all processing, you might be able to get output that's pretty close to the original input.
Then all that's left is to actually get your wiki to call SESI's wiki translator, and create HTML out of that.

The thing I really want to avoid is the double work of doing macros/scripts from one wiki format to another, is not really a problem to embeed the output of SESIWiki into an other wiki or doc system, cos at the end everything is html.
The key thing is how to use the wiki engine used by Houdini for your own pourposes. So you can do two things:
Having a text file in SESIWiki format convert it to html
Having a site, for instance, the studio intranet, how to use the SESIWiki into it so people can directly write Houdini inhouse tools docs in the SESIWiki format and keep a consistency with the Houdini docs
Another useful thing will be in the case you can get a html file, as you have said with the output from othe wikis, how to make an operator help to use this file instead of the help embeebed into the HDA.
Basically I would be happy if the SESIWiki could be used outside of Houdini, as an stand alone wiki, this will help a lot for studios and 3rd party developers to write docs for Houdini custom tools.

Hi houdiniks
Sorry for the cross posting cos I have put this message also in the mailing list.
Well I am doing a set of tools and I am in the doubt of how to document them, in one side the wiki way in the Type Properties of every operator is quite cool in the other I also need to have this docs in a server for online consulting.
So I have seen that in the help directory of Houdini that you have all the help organized into a directory hierarchy and you have a text file with the doc in wiki format and the corresding .html file with the translation to html.
Will be great to use the same method for my tools so this way I can get them working in both Houdini and a server.
The thing is, is it possible to implement the Houdini wiki in my server? Is there any command/s that will get the whole hirarchy of docs in wiki format and pass them to html?
If my project's help follows the next hirarchy:
$HOME/src/MyTools/help/MyTools
And then under this directory I have the index.txt and index,html. How can I point to this page from the Houdini web browser?
Of course I a msetting the HSITE variable to $HOME/src/MyTools .
If I have a custom SOP node, for instance: MyFooSOPTool
And then instead of putting the help into the OTL I have something like:
$HOME/src/MyTools/help/MyTools/nodes/sop/MyFooSOPTool.txt
$HOME/src/MyTools/help/MyTools/nodes/sop/MyFooSOPTool.html
The help browser will be able to find the help files? Again with the HSITE variable pointing to the proper path.

thx

Thanks moonlightkiss.
I understand, this is the reason because I have tried with values close to 1, the default value for the point radius.
I guess that if the default values is 1, pscale values close to 1 should need a similar time to be calculatesd, isn´t it?

Hi
I get another problem with the Particle Fluid Surfacer Tool, when I have the pscale attribute in my particles the fluid generation takes forever, whereas without this attribute the tool works pretty fast.
The values for the pscale are in the range of , so is not a crazy size value in the particles, is just the surfacertakes a lot of time when tries to use the pscale attribute.
Anybody has suffer this before?
thx

Hi there.
Using H9.5.268, I am playing with the Particle Fluid Surface and I have seen some issues, not sure if they are bugs, some implementation limititations or just I am missing something:
- In the docs says that Exclude Lone Particles uses the particle radii to detect particles in the neighbourhood. Can this radii be a point attribute?, In case this attribute doesn't exists then radii is 1 by default?
- When using the pscale attribute in points the mesh generation takes forever. I have tried for instace using in pscale: fit01(rand($ID), .8, .9), just to get random values close to 1 and the mesh generation takes ages compared with not using pscale and set the Point Radius Scale to 1. Why?
- A big drawback of the tool is that many options seems to not work with multithreading, for instance: Exclude Lone Particles or Smoothing. So the impact when applying this options is quite big and the tols turns to be very slow.
- Would be really good to have a list of all the attributes that can be used in the tool.

Anyway the tool is great and do the job pretty well.
thx

kuba
Hi Pablo,
How is it going?
Unfortunately SESI suspended updating OGL errors on H9.5 mac version. The reason is that the fixes introduced further problems in another areas of Houdini. Fortunately in H9.7 everything is going to work fast and smooth. So can't wait for the next release. (Can you hear me SESI!!?)
Cheers,
kuba

Is going well well man …
I know that SESI decided to not include the new stuff for opengl in the current branch and wait for the next major release, the thing that really surprised me is why now the opengl is worse than 3-4 months ago.
In previuos versions I have some refreshment problems, but I can use Houdini, but now now is really hard to use, I had refreshment problems in many areas of the inteface and this is really annoying.
Hopefully we will have a solution soon.

I haven't been using Houdini for the last 2 months, but yesterday I installed the version 9.5.396 for the Mac.
I remember getting problems with the opengl in previous versions, like 3-4 months ago, many of these problems have been discussed before in this thread, but now this has got even worse, I don't if is due to these last versions or maybe the last update in the Nvidia drivers for Leopard, but now the refreshment problems makes almost imposssible to use the tool, and these problems happens in the timeline, parameters panel, shelf, etc …
I don't know if somebody has experimented also an increase in the opengl problems for the Mac version, are there any solutions that at least can decrease, if not solve these problems?
thx

MikeTaylor
After careful consideration, we have decided to save our OpenGL changes for the next release and not complete the back port of those changes to 9.5.

I understand, I think you take the correct decission.
Good to know that Houdini will improve the OpenGL, it one of the weak points of the tool, compared to the XSI viewport for example.

edward
2. Turn on more conservative SOP caching by setting the cull level >= 3.

Can you explain more about how Cull level works in the SOP cache.
Also can memory be saved playing with the OBJ cache, or this just cache transformations?
Another thing I usually do when dealing with modelling is saving the state I want to “freeze” as a .bgeo file, place a File SOP and continue from this point, this way I alway keep a very small footprint in the scene size cos all the geo is outside. Sometimes this helps a bit.

Hi SESI.
I am finding some problems using Reselect for Current Tool.
Basically when I select it I can reselect but when I agree the selection the previus selection is used instead of the new one, so basically is not doing nothing.
I am testing it using the Gropu SOP.
Houdini 9.5.339 on Mac.
Thanks

Hey houdiniks.
I have been experimentifn some nestabilities with Houdini on the Mac but one which is really a problem is the kernel-task.
As many Mac users should know the kernel_task is the operating system kernel itself, usually liek in linux for example, it uses a lot of CPU when the system needs to swap memory or doing stuff related with memory paging or changing contexts between threads or applications …
But eith Houdini many times I open Houdini, open a scene an after some time working the kernel_task begin to use one of the cores of the machine, and I have more than enough memory …
Also if I put a render with Mantra after working for some hours the kernel_task begin again to be insane and use the half of my macbook pro power.
This only happens when Houdini, if I close or kill Houdini (many times is freeze) kernel_task return to it's usual 0-10% of the CPU.
Anybody having this problem also?