I try to put certain points in a group. Sometimes I'm able to do it but I don't understand how. Can someone guide me?

Getting really frustrated at houdinis selection procedures. Thankfull for any answers or tips of selections tutorials.

Thx

Call up the help, and type “selection” into the find field. There's the “Select tool” entry, “Selection”, “trouleshooting selection” which gives some good info. Of course there's the general tutorials that walk you through the intro to Houdini, that sort of stuff.

To quickly describe what you want, though:

1. Ensure you're looking at a SOP Viewport, not Object. Until the animator wraps their brain around the notion of objects and their contents being SOPs this can be confusing.

2. hit Tab in the viewport, select Group. Note the bottom blue status line - this tells you what to do for this OP.

3. Ensure you have Points selected on the selector on the left of the viewport. You can hit “1” also. This is the primitive type you want to select.

4. Select your points. There's all sorts of methods like type of picking(add, toggle, remove, replace), using the shift key to override this and add points, etc. Click and drag to lasso, or click on individual points. With shift you can keep adding. Click where there's no points to start selecting over again.

5. When you have the ones you want, hit the right mouse button, as the status line said.

6. There's now a new group SOP with those points as a member.

Cheers,

J.C.

that leads me to selection number two, I can't search in the help, the search tab is blank.

But thanks for the answer. As I understand you cant edit the group members by selection tools?

Can you see a field label “find” it's a bit confusing because it isn't in the same panel as the search tab but in the other half of the help window. Also next to it to the right it says “find on page…” that isn't a hint but a button that changes the way the search works.

To Sesi: this is a very odd layout for searching and seems to confuse a lot of people.

when I do that I get this error message:

CreateProcess failed for ‘java -jar CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome/doctool.jar -templateSrc CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome/templates -index CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome
-mode console’
CreateProcess failed for ‘java -jar CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome/doctool.jar -templateSrc CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome/templates -index CPROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.357/mozilla/chrome
-mode console’

edit: I installed Java using the java installer on mozillas homepage and everything works fine.