… is this a bug.. or i'd ask for an RFE?… I cant use attribute (or local variables) to peak points… any reason? (apart from a fair enought reason I've got from Peter ) …

cheers

I agree this is kinda of annoying but since the Peak SOP works on unnormalized normals you can use a Point SOP to scale the normals before hand. This works quite well with the SoftPeak SOP too.

thanks Wolf.. that was interesting, I'm always happy to see how many different ways we've got to do the same or similar things …

my problem is that I'm on a pretty dense mesh.. and I needed to use the $LIFE variable transferred to the result of metaballs copied on particles…

anyhow.. I made a simple VOPsop which does the same as peak .. except it allows me to use any attribute I want as multiplier of peak.

I must admit that since Paul gave me the great advice about vopSOP operators i'm using 'em all the time specially for easy normals or color things.. which is -loooot- faster than pointSOP .. or others SOP which can “easly” done with vopSOP.

I wish I was that good with VOP (and math) to solve my other particles “group interact” problem..

cheers

Aye VEX SOPs are great.

When I'm still prototyping and trying to figure out a game plan I use tons of AttributeCreates and Point SOPs everywhere because they are quite quick to create and manage. But once the dust starts to settle and I'm happy with my workflow I'll go and replace all the “slow” SOPs with semi-generic VOP SOPs. After I've done the effect a few times and have further fine tuned the process I'll go and rewrite the VOP SOPs as plain VEX SOPs because they are easier to maintain and propagate throughout hip files. Once the job is done I'll go back through my collection VEX SOPs and pick the ones that can be useful for general use and clean them up a bit. After that I'll add them to my ever growing library of VEX utils.