Hi, do any of you golden oldies out there remember the reason for “soft locking” being abandoned? I was just looking at opset in the help (textport version) and noticed it was still in there, I assume it doesn't work, (didn't try it though) and was thinking I yeah I remember that was really useful. Why did it get dropped?

I know you can create an edit sop with hscript to do the same thing but what a fag. Is there another way that soft locking was replaced somehow?

The downside of soft locking is that it doesnt get saved with the file. At least that was the behaviour a couple of releases ago. Do you experience it?

I gave up using it about 3 or 4 releases ago. But didn't it used to get saved to the file….. hmmm can't remember, certainly it would only really be useful if it did.

I think it did get saved in the hip file.
But that must have been back when you could model and edit in any SOP. I presume Houdini moved away from that when the model SOP and the ability to edit in any node got dumped. Then it really wasn't necessary to retain soft locking.

Man, i'd completely forgotten about that. I'm looking forward to opening up some of my old hip files to see what it turns into.

Jerry

Yeah, I was just thinking how useful it would be for sops that cook really slowly if you soft locked them it would remember the data changes but not bother re-cooking the sop.

Not saving to a hip would make it useless at best, dangerous at worst. Softlock was something that worked if you didn't change your pointcount - let's say you wanted to pull a point from a sphere away from the surface to make a bulge. When you hard lock it, everything before that SOP in the network is ignored completely, and the actual data is saved in the hip file - it was truly fixed. If you softlocked, it was still cooking - you could insert SOPs prior to the softlocked node and as long as you didn't alter the pointcount, you could fiddle about with the data and the softlocked SOP would perform the same action as before.

Not sure why it was dumped - but I'll admit I never depended on it. Perhaps it was because it was yet another thing you needed to “remember” and had to keep track of(insert an extra point - *poof*). Also, you would often get unpredictable results and just have to unlock it anyway(for example, applying a magnet in the above example might make for strange results).

Cheers,

J.C.

Concidering how many other things work like that already it seems odd to isolate that one function as a special one to be careful of. Frankly you need to be careful with any and all procedural networks…

I think anything you could do with softlock can now be done with the Edit SOP. So we dropped the less procedural of these two equivalent methods (the softlock).

At least that's my understanding… Not really my area of expertise…

Mark

I think that changing a point position using the geometry spreadsheet will still soft lock the SOP.

Ah yes of course it only deals with point positions…. I'd really like to see something that could store any changes, attributes and positions. Oh well an interesting trip down memory lane anyway 8)
I guess writing out a version and using attribcopy is just as good.