Hi, Im new to houdini, and this is a newbie question…
just wondering how can I merge redundant nodes like deleting history in maya.
I mean, I was trying to delete couple faces on a poly mesh, by selecting 1 face and hit delete key, Houdini creats a “blast” node, and if I select another face and hit delete again, 1 more blast node is created… by the end of the day, I got a chain of blast nodes in the network. is there a way to merge them together just like deleting history?

thanks

hi and welcome ,

i don't know how deleting history works in maya but if you simply want to merge those .. select those and press Shift+C .

Another option is to right-click a node, ‘save geometry’ (to .bgeo format) and then re-import with a File sop.

unlike Maya there is often little need to ‘delete history’ in Houdini - in fact, Houdini's procedural nature makes it unwise to ‘delete history’ at all…

so you have a couple of options:
1 - lock the last node - the red flag
this will lock all your changes into that one node while at the same time allowing you to UNlock the node and go back up the network and make changes

one disadvantage with this is that Houdini will load this SOP into mamory always - even if the object is not displayed/needed
and the hip file size will grow

2 - save out the geometry, then bring it back in with a File SOP
this is the one most people use…and if the object isn't displayed or needed in another object or contaxt then Houdini will not load the file SOP into memory - and the hip file size will not grow…

HTH

More options:

- After collapsing everything, click on the “lock” (red) button on the Subnet. This will cause the last geometry to be saved into the scene file so that it won't recook the next time you load it. Note though that if you change the nodes inside the subnet later, then you have have to unlock, relock to see the changes.

- At the geometry level, hit ‘s’ (select tool) in the Scene View pane. Now Right-Click > Geometry > Delete History. This basically just locks the last node and deletes everything before it.

Personally, I don't recommend doing “Delete History” because it permanently destroys your history, never to be retrieved. It's much better to just collapse the nodes into a subnet and lock it instead. This way, if you ever need to go back, you still have all your old nodes. The nodes themselves take very little space in the scene file. However, when you “lock” a node, you will see your scene file grow by the amount of geometry you have locked each time.

EDIT: Drats, arctor beat me to the same reply. Note though that “save to a geo file” is to same thing as locking a node. Instead of having the geo file embedded into your scene file, you just have it saved separately out instead. The extra amount of disk space is the same.

thanks for the explanations guys
yea, different tools have different ways, gotta change a bit.

one thing however, in the view pane, by selecting mesh at geometry level, I didn't find “delete history” in the RMB pop up menu,only delete the whole geo… is that a different version thing?

you need to be in SOP context

that worked, thanks~

Have you tried topobuild SOP?
It seems this SOP can store the geometry that comes from first input and even you break the connection, it's still there.
As you can see in the picture below

Houdini_Zero
Have you tried topobuild SOP?
It seems this SOP can store the geometry that comes from first input and even you break the connection, it's still there.

Stash SOP is intended for this purpose