I know that the new poly bridge is awesome but what happened to the old bridge SOP, the one that allowed me to make a connection between nurbs trimmed surfaces or nurbs profiles?

How am I supposed to do it now?

Thanks!

Anyone?

It seems to be deprecated. Still exists, but not shown in the menu.
Check the “OPcustomize” file in the /houdini folder of your installation and comment the line:
opdeprecate -r “polybridge” 15.0 Sop bridge

Cool!

Off course I would prefer to do this kind of operation in nurbs without using deprecated tools if it was possible.

Anyway thanks for the tip!

I'm just learning Houdini (have used Max, Maya, Modo, Rhino and SolidWorks over the years) and would also like to know how you are supposed to do this in the current version of Houdini (15.565) as it is?

First I was looking for a way to extract the trimmed curves so I could loft them but couldn't find a way to do that?
Then I found this post…
Is NURBS modelling slowly being “deprecated”?

If a solids modelling type workflow would make its way into Houdini I would quite possibly be in heaven! Just saying

I don't think it's a secret that zero development effort is currently devoted to NURBS surface modelling.

Subdivision surfaces are much easier to work with. They also have many fewer fundamental mathematical and structural hurdles to overcome, (e.g. subdivision surfaces automatically stay connected as you deform the points, whereas NURBS don't, so you have to recompute NURBS bridging every frame), so they're also easier to make tools for, although not many have actually been made to so directly replace things like trim curves yet by trimming in uv space. That said, it's pretty easy to do many NURBS-like things with subdivision surfaces already.

Subdivision surfaces are also orders of magnitude faster to refine to polygons than NURBS, which is how Houdini can have subdivision surfaces and curves in the viewport by just hitting “=” to turn subdivision on and “-” to turn subdivision off.

“NURBS were the future”, as one colleague said.

Don't get me wrong, I love subdivs for many things - the reason why I switched to Modo from Maya almost 10 years ago for most of my work. Just a joy to work with. Making holes in complex organic surfaces while keeping perfect curvature is not one of the things it's good at though…there's a reason why architects and product/vehicle designers needing perfect surface continuity generally use CAD programs, mixing solids and nurbs.

I'm not really that much into nurbs, much more fun is solids modeling, like in solid works, nx, inventor etc. There are certain types of hard surface designs where this kind of modeling excels and is fast and approachable at the same time - not computationally fast off course…

Modo added MeshFusion which lets you do solid type Boolean operations with subdivision surfaces and it is really quite ground breaking. A huge thing missing though is that modo doesn't have construction history and I'm a sucker for parametric and procedural modeling. So I've basically been switching between modo and solid works and just dreaming of a program that would combine the two. It might actually happen in the future with modo but what I was hinting at with my last sentence is that from my perspective, if Houdini had something like mesh fusion it would already be there - along with all the other amazing things that I'm starting to love about Houdini

ndickson
although not many have actually been made to so directly replace things like trim curves yet by trimming in uv space.

Nice RFE suggestion you got there.