Dear Experts,

I've failed to figure out a way to do the following, and perhaps I'm not even thinking about this correctly. I'm importing a mesh that is a series of chain links. I'd like to separate them so I can treat each one individually. Separating them into different VDBs would be great, but other formats would be fine too. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks so much!
Mary

Hi mgbaker, just choose ‘for each connected piece’ and put a ‘VDB from polygons’-node inside.

Thank you so much, Konstantin – that works beautifully!

Mary

Dear Konstantin and Others,

I find I have one more question (at least!) on this topic. Using Konstantin's suggestion I can separate the objects into distinct VDBs, but how do I give them different names? I can give them an attribute that numbers them distinctly, but in the vdbfrompolygons node in my for loop I can't figure out how to get that number into the name, and it therefor gives the same name to all the vdbs. I've attached the file in question and also a screenshot of the geometry spreadsheet showing the vdb numbering and the names.

Thanks so much!
Mary

Dear Mary,

you could append an enumerate node, set it to string and overwrite the name attribute.

Thanks, Konstantin! Your suggestion was very helpful, and in the process of implementing it I figured out that I had some fundamental confusions about Houdini for loops as compared to software for loops. So, progress was made!

Thanks again,
Mary