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studiomartinmelis
Hi, I'm a Houdini beginner and I followed some tutorials to get familiar with Houdini. Today I tried to practise what I've learned and immediately I countered a problem. I generated two objects with 'tab'/'box'. I tried to combine these two boxes and use a boolean operator. For some reason the boolean node is not available, while following the tutorial it worked just fine. Can anyone explain what is happening here? Thanks!
Jeff Farnsworth
Without seeing more detail, I am going to assume that you are up in what they call the object level when creating those two boxes (the default when opening Houdini, the upper right corner of the window panel will say "Objects").
Running the tab/box command a couple times from there created two geometry object nodes, each with a box. The problem you're running into is that the boolean operator doesn't work between top level objects like that... it works within geometry nodes. Aren't those the same? No, sorry. But no worries, you just need to go inside of a single geometry node to build up what you want.

So from that top object level - do the tab/box command to create a single geometry node with a box. That'll create a node named box1, with the word Geometry above it. Double click on that node to drill inside.

This time the upper right corner of the window panel will say "Geometry", and you'll be inside the node with a box. The node is still called "box1", but now looks different (has a little gray cube icon in the center instead of the colored cylinder/cone/sphere icon, and doesn't have the "Geometry" label above it). To help get your bearings, type "u" to go back up to the object level to see the geometry node as before. Now double click it again to go back inside. The whole thing is like a folder/path system. You can also see the path in a bar at the top of that panel that'll show "obj > box1".

Now from inside the geometry node, do the Tab/Box command once again to have a second box node appear. These are two Box nodes inside the same geometry object. In the viewport, move one of these boxes to the side a little bit. Now you can create a Boolean operator node, wire in the two boxes and mess around with the options.

Hope that helps! It's an awesome system once you get the hang of the different levels and contexts.

-Jeff
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