Hello all, another newb here.

I'm working through the “brickify” tutorial (Nodes and Assets), and am now on page 64, instruction 9.

After I Copy Parameter and Paste Copied Relative References, the resulting format of the parameter link:

ch(“../../board_sizey”)

works fine. However, when I edit it to

ceil(“../../board_sizey”)

it returns zero, no matter the setting at the peg_board panel. I've tried editing the panel to Float 2 instead of Vector 2 to see if the issue is at that end, no dice - same failure.

The same things happens with all the other comparable functions int, trunc, floor. Only ch works.

I can continue on from here with ch, but would like to know what's up here.

UPDATE: Apparently it's a bug in the tutorial, not the software. ch is required to evaluate the named parameter, ceil etc. don't do that, they expect the numerical data. The tooltip reports that ch is expecting a *string* input, but “ceil” etc. expects a float. SO I tried

ceil(ch(“../../board_sizey”)/2)*2

and it works fine.

ch is for channel, so ch(“../../board_sizey”) would take the value of the channel board_sizey.

ceil(“../../board_sizey”) would always return 0 because (“../../board_sizey”) is just a path, not a value.

If you want to get a value of something you always need ch(“path_to_something”) and if your channel is a string or you need a string in return, you would use chs().

Hello fsimerey,

Thanks for the confirmation, that's the conclusion I came to. It's a bug in the tutorial, they omitted the “ch” function inside the parentheses for “ceil”.

Notwithstanding that, I'm liking what I've seen so far in just a week or so of learning Houdini, and have encountered fewer such issues here than I have in the Autodesk tutorials for Maya.

I look forward to reaching the point where I can go “off-road” and start re-doing some of my LightWave FX work in Houdini.