Hello,

We just released a new Stable version of MOPs after several months of Experimental builds. There are a ton of updates from the previous Stable version, including upgraded Explode, Curl Noise, and Sweep Spline nodes, a new Noise Patterns tool node, some new shelf tools for compressing/expanding the HDAs, performance improvements, bug fixes, and fixed Falloff previews that no longer require sprites as of Houdini 17.0.498.

The full changelist is on the Release page: https://github.com/toadstorm/MOPS/releases/tag/v0.1.36 [github.com]

There is also a new in-progress MOPs Wiki that acts as a high-level overview of everything MOPs is capable of. You can find the link here: https://github.com/toadstorm/MOPS/wiki [github.com]

MOPs is a motion graphics toolkit for Houdini that intends to simplify common workflows in Houdini to encourage fast iteration and flow. It's designed to be accessible by newcomers to Houdini, but also useful as an extensible framework for experts to create new workflows of their own.

We welcome questions, comments and feedback from users!

Thank you for this amazing tool. If there's anything that I would love to see, it would be additional tutorials, ideally creative/project oriented to show the many possibilities of MOPs.

For instance, it would be useful to show how some of the Entagma tutorials might be approached with MOPs – polyfolding, voronoi morph etc. seem like would be quite doable with MOPs.

Either way, many thanks for making this incredible add-on!!!

Glad you like it!

We want to have more educational stuff online, though video tutorials tend to outdate themselves rather quickly, and they're time-consuming to produce. We'll likely try to start making more of that once the rapid prototyping phase of MOPs slows down a bit, so we don't have to turn around and re-record months later. Many of our current videos are already outdated. Right now we'll be focusing on the wiki, tightening up the individual documentation for each node, and adding more example files to the repository, which might help you out as far as seeing existing workflows.

As far as Entagma tie-ins… I'll leave that decision up to Moritz and Manu. There's certainly plenty of potential for overlap there.

Hi Mo,

thank you for MOPs. Really incredible.

I'm having a problem installing it though. It installs and works fine, but then Redshift won't load. And if I move Redshift last in the ENV, then MOPs won't load.

Thoughts?

Thank you

Terence

Hope you don't mind if I reply for Mo. Glad you like MOPs!

The “&” character in the Houdini.env has a special meaning… it means the “default” value for a given variable. This means you only really need to use it once per variable you're defining, if at all. If you use it twice for the same variable, especially something important like HOUDINI_PATH, you can confuse Houdini.

You should be able to get both Redshift and MOPs working fine by removing the “&” from the MOPS variable, and then just declaring HOUDINI_PATH once, like this:

HOUDINI_PATH=“C:\ProgramData\Redshift\Plugins\Houdini\17.0.506;$MOPS;&”

Thanks Toadstorm!

Hi everyone!

A new Stable release of MOPs is finally available. I'll just link to the changelog here:

https://github.com/toadstorm/MOPS/releases/tag/v0.1.52 [github.com]

I hope you'll take a look!

I just want to say thank you both for doing this. MOPs is one of the most useful toolsets ever created, and I hope that more and more people learn about it.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will double down on my request for what I would call “creative tutorials”, I hope perhaps Entagma will start.

In the meantime, I'll also offer a short tutorial (geared for Mac users, but completely applicable to Windows and Linux users) on how to organize the Houdini.env file when using it with multiple add-ons such as MOPs, Game Developer Toolkit, etc.

https://youtu.be/Ey4mUTZG2Ys [youtu.be]

Thanks! I'd like to do more educational stuff for it, but it's just very time-consuming to plan and execute, and my top priority has been to tighten up the existing toolkit before branching out into other things, including more advanced documentation. I hope you've checked out the MOPs Wiki in the meantime, it's a pretty good overview of the intent behind each node, and some hints for dealing with the trickier ones.

Of course, the core MOPs toolkit is open source, so anyone who'd like to contribute educational materials is perfectly welcome to do so. Thanks for that video, by the way! I'd recommend taking a look at the latest README.MD on MOPs… there's a newer way to install add-ons to Houdini (17.5+) called “packages” that makes the process a lot easier and more modular when you're using multiple toolkits simultaneously. Houdini's documentation on it is here. [www.sidefx.com]

Since MOPs is similar to the mograph module in c4d, is there a “fracture object-like” node in MOPs. In the sense that if I already have a setup say made from copy n transform or copy to points and would want to manipulate these objects via TOPs, is there a node to pipe them so they maintain their initial positions and rotation until I add MOPs modifiers?

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do here, but any packed primitives generated or modified by MOPs are just plain packed primitives. Anything that works on points or packed primitives will work with MOPs. If you're stuck on something specific, feel free to ask here or email me at mail@motionoperators.com.

toadstorm
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do here, but any packed primitives generated or modified by MOPs are just plain packed primitives. Anything that works on points or packed primitives will work with MOPs. If you're stuck on something specific, feel free to ask here or email me at mail@motionoperators.com.

Assuming there is a table model with components(top and four legs). How do you use MOPs operators to control or animate the individual components. A mops instancer will take in the model and distribute it in a grid, linear, honeycomb etc. The MOPs explode is the only node which nearly does what I am implying however that only works on the polygon faces of the input object. Is there any way to work on individual components of a model with its own distributed or modeled structure. For eg. a Transform, Delay and Spring MOPs could be used to transition in the various components of the table.

I hope this is clear enough.

Sure, this can be done pretty easily. I'm attaching an example file for you. The quick way to convert objects to packed primitives here is to use MOPs Convert, but you can also do it manually if you'd like via Connectivity, Pack, and a couple other nodes. I'm demonstrating both methods. Once everything's packed, I'm just setting up pivot points for animation and then animating a falloff to un-shrink each piece in Y over time. Let me know if you have any questions!

toadstorm
Sure, this can be done pretty easily. I'm attaching an example file for you. The quick way to convert objects to packed primitives here is to use MOPs Convert, but you can also do it manually if you'd like via Connectivity, Pack, and a couple other nodes. I'm demonstrating both methods. Once everything's packed, I'm just setting up pivot points for animation and then animating a falloff to un-shrink each piece in Y over time. Let me know if you have any questions!

Indie user
But I am glad you pointed me to the right node: “MOPs Convert”. Was looking in the Generator's tab instead. The MOPs Convert does exactly what I asked!
Thank you very much

Hello again! I've finally just released MOPs v1.00. This includes a ton of updated nodes and bugfixes, so it's best to just read the changelog here [github.com].

Next in line is the MOPs Masterclass, which hopefully I'll have time to record soon, and then the new commercial release after that.

Thanks everyone!

Thanks for your hard work and congratulations on the v1 release! That's a huge milestone.

toadstorm
then the new commercial release after that.

Will there still be a free version?

goat
Will there still be a free version?

Yes, of course! I'm still maintaining and will release bugfixes for the open source version; I'm just focusing any new feature additions on the commercial version.

Hey toadstorm,

I want to say thank you for MOPS! It's a real joy to work with this set of tools.

Cheers
CYTE