It will be nice to make a user interface of DA with paint and comb support

this has been discussed quite a bit in the past few years…

there are workarounds…
but from my understanding of HDAs, that functionality would fundamentally change the definition of what an HDA is for…

Hey Arctor! Why?

HDAs are tools, that are static…
they are explicitly defined on disc and are intended to be used, or rather intended to have the ability to be used on a shot, or a show or throughout an entire studio…
adding edit/paint/comb etc functionality to HDAs, while nice and cool form some points of view would mean that the definition would not be static…

what I would like to see is additional features of HDAs that makes it easier to feed data into, and get data out of them…

I'm doing something right now that uses an little HDA, but I need to have two different outputs from the node…so now I have to use two fetch nodes to get the data out…
special inputs and special outputs would cover most people's needs in this area, while keeping the HDA paradigm intact.

as I said there have been some really good discussions about this already…it would be worth doing some searching to find them…they're very informative threads….

:roll: I will find it…

this has been discussed quite a bit in the past few years…

there are workarounds…

I'm quite interested to find out how this might be done too. I don't seem to be able to locate any info on the matter except this post

J

Something that i dont quite get, HDAs are meant to be static? But through the top level interface we can edit parameters, that link down into the HDA content, changing its values on the nodes.

Take a value that edits a point nodes colour and normal values. This changes the attributes values, in the same way a paint node and comb node will do. What cause the issue I suppose is storing the changes, but this isnt much diffrent to storing changes on an interface just on larger scale i.e storing an array of colour or normal values. But we wouldnt be changing the contents directly ala deleting, reconfigureing the node network.

This is quite specfic issue with mainly edit,paint,sculpt and comb tools i guess. I agree that this would be very usefull to have supported in a HDA.

One method of a work around if i rememeber right(correct me if im wrong) would be to change the paint node inside of the HDA in a take. Other wise you will have to input your painted geomatry externally and object merge into the HDA.

Cheers
Nick

I've never understood this either, it really should be handled the same way locked data is for normal sops. The interface doesn't change and the data is just stored in the hip file for that particular instance of the asset. Job done, anyway I said it before too many times so I'll shut up.