Hi all!

In XSI you could apply one property to multiple objects:
- Select a hierarchy and get > property
- Put many object in a group then select the group then get > property
In Houdini, there must be a way to do that? :shock:

What I'm actually trying to do: I have a multi-level hierarchy of objects in my scene…
- All of them should have the same subdivision.
- Some of them should get the same material, all the other ones would get a second material.
- Some of them would get the same material but different textures.

So how to share properties on hierarchies in Houdini 14?
Thanks

You can't do it in the same way, Houdini has its own approach to things and these are the kind of things that take time to pick up as in each occasion you will want to do in a different way to get the benefits of certain approach.

You could do it using an object merge to “collect” these object and apply your settings, then you render the “collector”.

On some occasions it may be better to simply attach the attributes to the objects and use it as if it were overrides (you can assign a material to all of them and then pick a few of those and override the attribute that points to the material)

In terms of subdivisions you don't have the need to apply multiple levels as Houdini takes care of it but still, that is something I would suggest to handle with an object merge as if it were a collector.

In the guides I wrote there are a few examples on the subject on page 90 onwards that talk about organising overrides and describe these strategies.

Hope it helps.
jb

Thanks a lot Jordi for taking the time to answer me!! I'll experiment all these advices and dig more in your docs!!

With your extensive experience of Softimage and Houdini, what do you think of Houdini's way to handle shared properties?

Cheers mate
David

Houdini brings his own world, vocabulary and way to structure things, properties are great on a hierarchical application with linear history, in the context of Houdini with “non-linear history” and truly procedural approach they simply are too limiting and as any other package, Houdini brings its own approach to how structure your world.

Chances are you will fall in love with string based attributes and how you can literally bend backwards the application to do things totally incredible but of course you will have to embrace the Houdini way, not bad believe me.

Ultimately you will face a few thing you need and that is my daily battle so far;

- Separating Development from Production states on a scene (in Soft this is trivial with the use of Overrides and Passes/Partitions), In Houdini you will have to use objects collecting objects and applying attributes and Bundles to achieve the same-ish.

- Manipulating the object and its history in one single go (object+history), in Houdini you will have to tweak the interface so you can select an object and see the internals without having to dive into it which is extremely annoying for me.

- Grouping as a mean to manipulation in XSI is great, in Houdini just does not make sense to use groups, simple as that. Instead you will start using “collectors” (one new object that has object merges in side and allows you to apply whatever)

- Manipulation in general, something H14 improved massively and H15 apparently further improves, specially manipulating multiple objects at once.

- Materials approach or how to apply them (inside as part of SOPs? or OBJ level?) again this will become the topic of many lunches… you will see there is no one way rules them all like in XSI as these bring their own advantages.

- Material construction apparently in H15 has been improved massively so you will be finally able to do proper material layering easily, build them also easily in VOPs, etc… so this one is meant ti be easy from now on.

These are IMHO all the things I think you need to find your way, the rest is easier and better so it is quite easy to adapt.

Oh, and let go on the whole Freeze thing. ;-)