I was wondering if it's possible to select a Transform SOP in the viewport ?

I have an object with about 30 groups that are attached to a Transform. I can track down the Transform that is attached to the group I need to edit in the Network View every time.

But it would make life so much easier if I could see, and select the Transform SOP in the viewport, as in most 3D Apps.

Is there a way to do this in Houdini ?

I tried fiddling around by adding a "Visualiser", but that didn't seem to work.

The viewport only interacts with the results of the sops, not the entire chain of nodes. It's up to you to pick the right node to edit--as they have no correlation in the viewport. You wouldn't select a transform sop up a chain, you would create a new transform at the end of the chain, although there are reasons in procedural models to edit transforms up the chain as they might be in a different desired space.

toonafish
But it would make life so much easier if I could see, and select the Transform SOP in the viewport, as in most 3D Apps.

Other apps don't have transform sops so I don't see how that would relate. Other apps you would be selecting different objects in a hierarchy, which in houdini is done at object level, not with sops. Sops is flat so has no hierarchy. If you want a hierarchy but a sop like chain, you could move to Solaris. In Solaris you can interactively select various levels of a hierarchy by using Model Kinds, it will still create edits at the end of the graph though.

in SOPs you can still use kinefx to represent your objects as points with packed geo even define any potential hierarchy and then just use Rig Pose SOP to move them all around visually in the viewport

Thanks, that’s what I was afraid of. But then I’d end up with dozens of transforms affecting a single group, imagine having to animate that.

I’ll look into using KineFx, thanks.

But on a side note, wouldn’t it be brilliant if you want a quick setup to animate parts of a geo, if one could just add a Transform, place the pivot, and start animating ?
That would be a viable workflow on top of the more convoluted ones, with just the simple adjustment of adding the possibility of making the Transform gizmo visible and selectable in the viewport, as if it were a Null.

But I guess that would be too easy.

You can probably make a Python shelf tool that calls hou.SceneViewer.selectGeometry(), which as the user to make a selection interactively. Then after you select a point, you iterate over all the Transform SOP and select the one of which group parameter matches the selected point('s name or something).

But it's too much work so I personally would just use kinefx as tamte suggested.

But on a side note, wouldn’t it be brilliant if you want a quick setup to animate parts of a geo, if one could just add a Transform, place the pivot, and start animating ?
That would be a viable workflow on top of the more convoluted ones, with just the simple adjustment of adding the possibility of making the Transform gizmo visible and selectable in the viewport, as if it were a Null.

I guess you can... with like 10x amount of Python code than what I just described...