Hi,

I am very new to Houdini - just heard of it and downloaded the apprentice last week and started playing around with it. I am going through just traditional polygon modeling before I start learning procedural and have a couple of questions…

1. Most annoying - say I want to fuse two vertices that are very close and I zoom in. In the perspective viewport they dissapear as if they are culled by the near plane. how do I make it not cull , so i can do fine - editing.
2. How do you align vertices ? For example - in Maya or Max you could select vertices and scale them down until they are aligned. I tried the same in Houdini, but it doesn't seem to stop scaling after they are aligned. Rather, if I move mouse too much it will scale it out of alignment again (hope what I said makes sense…). I assume it's a matter of holding down some key or checking a parameter ?
3. Is there something like turbosmooth in Houdini ? In 3ds/maya you could turbosmooth a rough object and then go around and straighten the edges with loops. Does houdini have a similar workflow in traditional modeling ?

Any help appreciated.
Thanks !

1. press D in viewport, go to Viewport tab and adjust the clipping settings (especially near clip plane)
in case you are looking through camera, clipping settings are on the camera object View tab

2. you'd probably have to edit the scale value manually in Parameters pane to 0,0,0

3. either Subdivide SOP, or you can add viewportlod property (Display As) to your object (grom Gear menu/Edit Rendering Parameters) if it doesn't exist on your object already. Change it to Subdivision Surface to display your object as subd surface in the viewport